Heidegger, Zizek and Revolution 9462096813, 9789462096813

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Heidegger, Žižek and Revolution

PERSPECTIVES OF CRITICAL THEORY AND EDUCATION Volume 1 Series Editor Olli-Pekka Moisio, University of Jyväskylä, Finland Advisory Board Stephen Brookfield, University of St. Thomas Minneapolis, USA Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley, USA Douglas Kellner, University of California at Los Angeles, USA Michael A. Peters, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), USA Juha Suoranta, University of Tampere, Finland Christiane Thompson, Martin-Luther-University at Halle-Wittenberg, Germany Scope This series maps the field of critical theory and its role in articulating the central problems of education, schooling, culture, and human learning and development in the current historical social, political, economical and global situation. It aspires to build a consistent approach to philosophy and sociology of education from the viewpoint of critical theory, as well as new openings for the future critical theory of education. It will also examine examples of pedagogical experiments, new utopian thinking, and educational policies with a strong accent on actual policies and examples. Series will commission books on the Frankfurt School critical theory in relation to the question of education and social settings of human learning and development. It seeks authors who can demonstrate their understanding of the history and systematical issues in the tradition of the Frankfurt School in the setting of pedagogy, education and learning.

Heidegger, Žižek and Revolution

Tere Vadén Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

vii

Chapter 1: Introduction A Revolution, After All? Radical Heidegger as the Starting Point

1 1 2

Chapter 2: Metaphysics is Politics Truth is Not Neutral

5 5

Heidegger and Žižek in Everyday Politics Heideggerian Marxism and Žižek as the New Marcuse? The Problem with the Liberal Subject

8 12 16

Chapter 3: Heidegger on Revolution The Subject, the Worker, the Polis “Nur Noch Die Jugend Kann Uns Retten” Heidegger’s Step and Its Direction

27 27 38 52

Chapter 4: What is Wrong in Heidegger’s Revolution? A Small Man Living in Hard Times The Liberal Criticism: Too Much Postmodernism Decisionism The French Critiques: Too Little Postmodernism Nazism as Anticommunism Nazism as Asubjective National Experience The Typical Marxist Critique Žižek’s Untypical Marxist Critique and Praise

65 65 68 71 79 82 83 88 96

Chapter 5: Industrial Agriculture and Concentration Camps or the Will and Evil

111

Chapter 6: Žižek on a See-Saw

127

Chapter 7: Žižek and Heidegger Avec Means

139

Bibliography

155

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The origin of this text is a course on Heidegger and Žižek in the University of Tampere; I want to thank all participants for lively discussions. The writing itself was made possible through a grant by the Finnish Association of Non-Fiction Writers. Warmest thanks also to Juha Suoranta and Mika Hannula who gave crucial comments and criticism on the manuscript along the way.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

A REVOLUTION, AFTER ALL?

If the last century was characterised by the widening scope and deeper penetration of capitalism, modernism, economic growth, mass culture and representational democracy in nation states, it was also a century of revolutions against these developments. The October revolution in 1917 in Russia and the National Socialist revolution in 1933 in Germany were the most impressive challengers to liberal capitalism in Europe. In their distinct ways, both revolutions tried to reinstate ideals absent from bourgeois materially oriented civilization and to tackle the problem of economic and social inequality. Both failed and in the process took their crown jewels, “socialist man/woman” and “Aryan master-race”, to their graves. But inequality has not disappeared, and even if postmodernism has put a wet blanket on utopias and ideals, most people are not happy with the vile harvest provided by individualistic capitalism—vile, it is often assumed, because of wrong values or a lack of values altogether. The responses that Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) present in the face of the catastrophic failures of the revolutions they admire— the socialist and the National Socialist—are similar. Both continue to insist that revolutionary change is necessary, but at the same time emphasise the role of careful and painstaking thought. The work of both thinkers is shot through with an urgent awareness of crisis, propelling them to untiring and unyielding philosophical resistance. In the 1950’s and 1960’s Heidegger speaks of the need to “be prepared for being prepared” and hints that maybe we need to wait 300 years before a new opening. Our contemporary Žižek is both more impatient and hesitant. At times he predicts that capitalism will face a cliff very soon, at times he claims that the 20th century saw too much of the action urged by Marx (“Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”) and too little calm and unhurried thought. Despite having once burnt their fingers and despite the genuine care they want to take in matters of philosophy, both thinkers are set alight by the idea of total upheaval: “If only we could think and enact a proper revolution…” Our proposal is that we spend some time attending to this hope for a genuine, properly thought-out and enacted revolution. On one hand, we can agree about the assessment of the situation. Really, things can not continue as they are. Heidegger’s warnings about the dangers of technology and Žižek’s reminders of how exploitation and injustice are a part and parcel of all types of capitalism hold true. A genuine 1

CHAPTER 1

revolution? Why not! Why not a revolution, if it would stop the destruction of nature and the subjugation of humans into resources for capitalism. On the other hand, there is a nagging doubt, “what if…”, a fear that the promised revolution turns sour. The doubt is based not only on the expectation of the return of previous disappointments and failures, of the revolution devouring its children. A dark cloud can be detected inside the idea of revolution itself. To borrow an interrogatory structure often employed by Heidegger: who (or what) is demanding a revolution from whom (or what)? In the name of whom is the demand made? Could it be that the demand is made in the name of someone or something to whom a revolution can not be an answer? What if revolution is the wrong answer to the right question? These two poles—“why not!”, “what if… ”—provide the tension through which we approach Heidegger’s and Žižek’s revolutions. RADICAL HEIDEGGER AS THE STARTING POINT

However, the two theorists will not be handled equally. Heidegger takes the foreground, for three reasons. First, Heidegger has become common background for nearly all contemporary critical philosophy, not the least for Žižek. Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein1, his critique of technology, and his narrative of the history of Being pop up time and again when liberalism, capitalism and consumerism are thoughtfully opposed. The reliance on Heidegger also creates a potential minefield, because for Heidegger himself his philosophy consistently meant a rejection of liberal democracy. When theorists relying on Heidegger want to deepen democracy and strengthen individual rights, the upshot is a performative contradiction: either they have not understood their Heidegger right or Heidegger himself was inconsistent. A synthesis between genuine democracy and the deepest roots of Heideggerian thought is still missing,2 even though, for instance, Jacques Derrida has stated that for him and many others the goal is to democratise Heidegger’s thought and to vaccinate it against “the worst.”3 Second, in a rare manner Heidegger was both a philosopher and an active, militant revolutionary, who in addition to his work at the university took part in politics. It must be remembered that Heidegger was an active participant in a successful and actual revolution—successful in terms of overturning the previous government and gaining power, if not in terms of all the goals of the revolutionary movement, not to speak of Heidegger’s goals for it. After the Second World War, in public Heidegger understandably tried to belittle his political activism. He was afraid that the baby of his thought would go with the bathwater of Nazism. His attempts seem to have worked relatively well, partly because many Heideggerian philosophers find it easy to believe that philosophy is necessarily remote from day-to-day politics. Heidegger’s critique of civilization is celebrated, his actions in politics not. One of the almost unbearable ironies of the case is that many Heideggerian wannaberevolutionaries want to have their Heidegger without the dirty everyday struggle of changing social structures, that is, without the revolutionary grassroots that they 2

INTRODUCTION

themselves—but not Heidegger!—lack. Here Žižek is one crucial step ahead of his postmodern colleagues, as he recognizes the philosophical importance of Heidegger’s revolutionary political action.4 Third, Heidegger takes the foreground because Žižek formulates his thought on revolution partly as a response to Heidegger. In addition to Hegel and Lacan, Heidegger is one of the first tools that find their way to Žižek’s hands. Both Žižek’s idea that truth is fundamentally partisan and his notion of the structure of a revolutionary act are directly connected to Heidegger (more precisely Heidegger’s notion of Werk): a revolutionary act creates ex nihilo a structure that before the act was impossible.5 So the question is about revolution, especially Heidegger’s revolution. If the picture Heidegger gives is, more or less, correct (technology as an epoch in the history of Being, the impossibility of democratically challenging technology, the fundamentally technological nature of Americanism, Bolshevism and, ultimately, Nazism), why is his revolution wrong, wrong for nature, wrong for humans in general and wrong for the workers, in particular? Juxtaposing Heidegger and Žižek, we intend to use both as criticisms of each other.6 What, exactly, is wrong in Heidegger’s revolution? Or is the leftist corrective, for instance, as presented by Žižek, wrong? Or is the notion of revolution itself already flawed? NOTES 1

2

3

4

5

6

I will use the term Dasein without translation. However, if the word seems alien, one can always read in its place “life”, as long as one remembers that life here does not mean a biological phenomenon or the life of an individual but rather life as in the expressions “German life”, “cabin life”, “military life”, “academic life” and so on (all of which, by the way, are Heidegger’s own expressions: “deutsche Dasein”, “Hütte-Dasein”, and so on). Pauli Pylkkö’s Aconceptual Mind. Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism (1998) tries to cure the anti-democracy of Dasein philosophy by a strong dose of non-classical natural science. The project is promising, but very few philosophers steeped in so-called continental philosophy or critical theory care enough about the natural sciences in order to follow. However, Arkady Plotnitsky (2002, 1994) works along the same lines. In the interview “’Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” published in Cadava et al. (1991). Repeatedly Žižek tells that he looks down on leftists that do not want to get their hands dirty. For the same reason he does not regret his involvement in Slovenian politics at the time when Slovenia was gaining independence from Yugoslavia and turning towards capitalism: “I despise abstract leftists who don’t want to touch power because it is corrupting. No, power is there to be grabbed. I don’t have any problem with that.” Boynton (1998). The connections can easily bee seen by comparing, for instance, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” (GA5, 48, 62-63) and Žižek’s description of the act in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism (2002a, 173-178). The plot goes like this: the penultimate end will be a Heidegger corrected by Žižek, but the Žižek used in the correction is first amended by a dose of Heidegger. Finally, we will have to leave also Heidegger’s incorrigible Europocentrism behind.

3

CHAPTER 2

METAPHYSICS IS POLITICS

TRUTH IS NOT NEUTRAL

Both Heidegger and Žižek want to burst the bubble of non-political philosophy. Philosophy is action, doing, politics in its genuine sense, or it is not at all. Not only is philosophy action, it is the most decisive kind of action. Heidegger and Žižek claim that everything depends on thinking, and, moreover, right now.1 Philosophy as action is absolutely decisive, urgent and world-historical. Here we find the most crucial connection between Heidegger and Žižek: for both, truth is partisan. Truth is accessible only from a limited, engaged, and partial position that has abandoned all safety nets. For instance, in his comments on Hölderlin—one of the most sensitive topics for Heidegger—Heidegger insists that hearing the word of the poet means risking a change, of being swept away so that all safety is lost. Only from this vulnerable experience may truth grow. For Heidegger, experience does not mean an accumulation of aesthetic and atmospheric snippets. Rather, experience contains an overwhelming force that the experiencing subject may very well feel as threatening: To experience something, be it a thing, a person, a God, means that this something happens to us, hits us, comes over us, turns us over and changes us. (GA12, 149)2 The same goes, according to Heidegger, for the German revolution that should not be treated as one fact or historical event amongst others. The revolution reveals its truth and greatness only to human life that has been transformed by the revolutionary experience. Žižek often uses directly political terms in defining his notion of the non-neutrality of truth. For instance, the truth of universal Christianity is not that “we” are Christians and “they” are not, but rather that the gap between being a Christian and not being a Christian is found inside all of “us” and “them” and that “[…] universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position.” (2006a, 35)—that is, from the point of the practising Christian. In this way, we are led to the political nature of truth: Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint is exactly like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, not to any neutral observer. (Žižek 2004, no page numbers) 5

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Consequently, Heidegger and Žižek have to be revolutionary. They see attempts at alleviating the excesses of capitalism as futile or even counterproductive, as such attempts only prop up the system. Neither Heidegger nor Žižek stand for slow, stepwise reformation. This revolutionary extremism is clear in Heidegger’s attitude towards ecological questions. A technological delay of climate change (for instance, through some kind of geo-engineering), will only deepen the real catastrophe, the technological understanding of Being. Similarly, in politics, softening or covering-up the nihilistic destruction caused by capitalism through various kinds of philosophies of values, virtue ethics or religious charity gets Heidegger’s as well as Žižek’s scorn.3 Such cushioning, first, makes the destruction in terms of the subjugation of humans even worse, and, second, muddles the truth: The parallel with Bolsheviks is absolutely pertinent: what Heidegger shares with revolutionary Marxists is the notion that the system’s truth emerges in its excess—that is to say, for Heidegger, as well as for Marxists, Fascism is not a simple aberration of the ‘normal’ development of capitalism but the necessary outcome of its inner dynamics. (Žižek 2009c, 7) Žižek’s details are a little hazy, but the insight is correct. Heidegger would not speak of Fascism4 and would not think that it (or, rather, Nazism) is the truth of capitalism only. Rather, Heidegger would insist that the wrong kind of Nazism, the kind that eventually prevailed, is the truth of not only capitalism but also Bolshevism because of the common foundation that they share: the technological understanding of Being. But Žižek’s observation is crucial: in a Hegelian way Heidegger thinks that the technological understanding of Being has to be completed, has to reach its fullest bloom, before its truth can be discerned and overcome. This simply because truth is a matter of experience. The technological understanding of Being is true. It is the way in which technological human being really is in the world. Only experience that grasps the roots of this technological experience in a new way may bring about change and a new kind of life. In order to live differently, one has to experience differently, and vice versa. Heidegger thinks that also the “neutral” truth that the rational subject possesses is partial and partisan. “Objective scientific truth” is the experiential truth of a metaphysics of subjectivity. Žižek does not speak about experientiality, but emphasises the ideological nature of all objectivities and self-evidentialities, which in itself means in Žižek’s Lacanian world that the subject is (libidinally, ideologically) implicated in such “objectivities”. Because truth is partial also when seen as objective, it hurts. Changing power relations, living differently and transforming the society— that is, politics and philosophy—are not purely or mainly intellectual or cognitive undertakings. They are based on experience. Another world means another experience. For instance, Žižek points out how Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis on the “objective” “end of history” has already died twice, first politically in September 2001 and then economically in September 2008. Both deaths were very traumatic. Here is another crucial commonality: both Heidegger and Žižek think that experiences that are drastic and undermine the subject’s control over her life are necessary for thought and action. 6

METAPHYSICS IS POLITICS

It is not hard to fathom that the liberalist notion of human being according to which a person is (and should be!) a separate individual that rationally maximises her/his benefit, by choosing both in the store and in the poll booth the alternative that she/ he likes most (or that maximizes her/his chances of survival, or economic position, or social standing, or psychological well-being, or what have you), is distasteful to Heidegger and Žižek. As a psychoanalyst, Žižek sees the rational individual as a tip-of-the-iceberg manifestation of the deeper and more powerful forces that make up a person, not as the true foundation or nucleus of personhood. We will return to the differences between Heidegger’s and Žižek’s notions of the subject. For now, it is enough to note that, following Heidegger, Žižek bases his notion of the subject on the idea that the subject is possible only because it is incomplete, finite, broken. At the same time, Heidegger’s long career with all of its twists and turns can be seen as a single extended campaign against the liberalist notion of human being. His ontology, epistemology, anthropology, social philosophy and philosophy of language are all thoroughly anti-liberal and anti-individualistic. What is it about liberal individualism that grates the nerves of Heidegger and Žižek? Let us give the word to Heidegger with a long quotation, so that the impetus can unfold. The quotation has to do with the nature of poetry.5 The topic is close to Heidegger’s heart, and he uses all of his considerable skills in showing that poetry is not the public linguistic expression of something individually and internally experienced: The writer Kolbenheyer says: ‘Poetry is a necessary function of a people.’ It does not take much understanding to realise that so is digestion, at least for a healthy people. When Spengler defines poetry as the expression of the prevailing cultural soul, the definition includes the manufacture of bicycles and cars. […] All of this is so hopelessly lame that we speak of it against our will. But we must mention it. First, because this way of thinking concerns not only poetry, but all that happens in human existence in all of its kinds […] Second, because the way of thinking does not arise from the fortuitous lameness or incapacity of an individual thinker. Rather, it has its essential ground in the mode of existence of humanity in the 19th century and of the modern time, in general. If the much misused term ‘liberalistic’ can and should be used to name something, then this way of thinking. For this way of thinking sets itself axiomatically and beforehand outside what it thinks about, makes it a mere object of its opinions. In this way poetry, too, is just an immediately encountered phenomenon, that can completely meaninglessly be categorised together with other phenomena as ‘expression’ of a soul bubbling somewhere underneath. This way of thinking itself forms a completion of the precisely definable ‘liberal’ human existence. Up till today, it has gained prominence in countless forms and versions, because it is easy to assume, does not concern anyone and is conveniently applicable on anything. (GA39, 27-28)6 The liberalist view of human being is mistaken simply because its sees a human being as a self-sufficient and free-floating entity, relating to things and other humans 7

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as it sees fit. Contrary to this, for Heidegger poetry, for instance, is a part of human being. When poetry exists, it makes humans the way they are. To put it crudely: poems tell us what it is to be human, what can be experienced, what can be expected, what language is, how we can live together and so on. These experiences in turn are what it is to be human. A human is human and the kind of human being that she or he is, because poetry has opened a world to her or him (and the kind of world it has opened). Only secondarily can a human being set herself or himself outside poetry and to analyse it as if from a distance. This secondariness means also a certain kind of thinness, flatness, thoughtlessness compared to the first-hand experience of poetry. Heidegger’s descriptive term is noteworthy: liberalism does not concern (angehen) anybody. Liberal views and opinions can be changed at will, without any deeper consequences for one’s humanity. The liberal view of human being is both too thin and flat and too diluted and distant. A liberal view does not present a duty, it does not put its holder into an emergency, unlike poetry that lives as a part of human being. What goes for poetry, goes for community: Heidegger sees community, Mitsein and shared language as fundamental experiential fields that precede the individual, and therefore have a claim on human being before and after the individual. His most famous work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) is one of the most erudite and forceful expositions of the community-before-individuals view that the history of philosophy has seen. Even though Heidegger’s definition of liberalism is quite broad and unusual, it functions as the basis for his own and for Žižek’s criticism. For both Heidegger and Žižek the fundamental error of liberalism is in its philosophical anthropology and, consequently, in its philosophical politics. Liberal politics is only a servant of liberal philosophy, incapable of real thought (Heidegger)7 or critique of ideology (Žižek). For this reason, neither Heidegger nor Žižek think of revolution as merely involving a change in political power relations. For both, revolution means a transformation of what it is to be human—a little bit like a religious rebirth, and not coincidentally, since the partiality of truth is related to the Kierkegaardian leap of faith, done without reason. For Heidegger, this transformation would mean the (re)birth of some kind of new communal experience and life, maybe in terms of a new god or at least something holy, which in time would make possible new meaning and new livelihoods. For Žižek, the transformation would mean adulthood in a LacanianHegelian vein, the abandonment of ideological crutches and setting an autonomous self-discipline in a communal project. HEIDEGGER AND ŽIŽEK IN EVERYDAY POLITICS

Even while most vigorously covering up his active involvement in the Nazi revolution, Heidegger never denies that his intention was to revolutionise German universities. This is no little goal, especially in the context of Heidegger’s bigger aim of aiding the rebirth of European spiritual life—European, which Heidegger took to mean Greek-German, because of the material and essential bloodline between the 8

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two peoples (stamm- und wesensverwandten, GA16, 283). In this sense, Heidegger’s overall project was intensely pedagogical. Like Heidegger himself puts it, the history of German universities is the history of German Geist, which in turn contains the history of Germany itself (GA16, 285). Heidegger never denies that his philosophy was intended to bring about a total upheaval and rebirth of European man. Even in his “philosophical testament”, the Spiegel-interview from 1966 titled “Only a God can save us”, Heidegger insist that for him the decisive question is what kind of political system our technological age needs.8 So the crucial question for Heidegger in the 1960’s is—according to himself—political. If Heidegger already in the 1930’s took part in an actual honest-to-goodness political revolution, how much more weight did the question of a political system carry in the 1960’s! Of course the situation had drastically changed, and Heidegger did not anymore pin his hopes on a political mass movement, but rather on preserving and nurturing the hope for change in some kind of cells of resistance.9 Accordingly, he changed his own pedagogical mode of operation. He quite consciously stopped lecturing to large audiences, and started working by giving meticulously prepared seminars to small groups in thoughtfully selected non-academic settings.10 But in each of the phases of his work, Heidegger was a revolutionary thinker who did not step back from real political work when he saw an opportunity for it. It is a truism that there is a certain distance between Heidegger’s thinking and the ideas of the Nazi leaders; such a distance always exists between the thinking of the leaders and what actually transpires (think of Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and the October revolution). This distance does nothing to prove that Heidegger was “apolitical”. Quite the contrary. That the distance existed and that Heidegger was aware of it11 and still chose to enter into revolutionary political work only highlights how committed Heidegger was to revolution, in general, and the Nazi revolution, in particular. In a rare way, Heidegger was prepared to interpret contemporary and past events as messages of Being-historical relevance, revealing tectonic shifts in Being itself and the thinking connected to it (Fügung). Sometimes Heidegger comes across almost as a pagan priest, reading the details of events as oracular prophesies. He strongly believed that thinking in general and his own thinking in particular had a (albeit indirect; more of this later) task in transforming everyday life and politics. His belief even took the forms of a kind of hubris.12 Such belief is also the background to Heidegger’s almost only show of remorse, the sentence “he who thinks great, errs great”.13 In a letter to his wife Elfride on March 4., 1946, Martin in simple prose analyses the phenomenon of erring (the topic being Martin’s poem “Tagwerk des Denkens”, GA81, 24). The letter explains that thinking means bringing into truth, i.e., into unconcealment. In other words, the more true your thinking, the more you are bringing the concealed into the open, and the bigger the possibilities of error. Only thoughtlessness guarantees no errors, and, conversely, the possibility of erring is a genuine part of thinking (2005, 243). The quote also shows that in Heidegger’s case the distance between thinking and everyday political action is not the familiar distance between theory and its practical 9

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application. In Heidegger, the distance is created by the genuine and irreducible concealment and mystery (Geheimnis) of Being. Truth itself contains a dangerous and irreducible tension between concealment and unconcealment, and therefore thinking is “distanced” from a direct causal efficacy on reality. Thinking can not cause and much less force anything to happen, simply because the truth embodied in thinking is full of struggle, tension, and not the product or possession of humans alone. But the hubris and a peculiar take on thinking should not lead us astray. We should not imagine that Heidegger was an otherworldly fool with either bad or good intentions. Once more: unlike many radical thinkers and revolutionary theorists, Heidegger worked for several years in preparing and then carrying out revolutionary ideas, innovating and implementing structural reform, with his party membership card in the uniform pocket.14 By taking up the rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger took the bull by the horns and chose the unthankful position of spearheading National Socialist structural reform in the German universities. His was the task of transforming lofty principles into everyday practice, and he took part not only in implementing reforms imagined elsewhere but in innovating new ways of giving educational flesh to National Socialist bones. Heidegger took this role not only in his home university, but in the broader world of the whole German university system. He not only planned, but carried out structural reforms that were by no means universally accepted or lauded. We will return to the details, but for now it is enough to remember that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 until its dispersal, took for years active part in forming National Socialist educational policy, implemented it in innovative ways in 1933-34 in Freiburg, and long after leaving the rectorship continued to take part in the internal struggle about the nature of National Socialist higher education. In politics, only the best was enough for Heidegger. Only politics that aspired to a total transformation of European life, of the re-evaluation of past values and the rebirth of new human being was good enough for him. Politics as thought (philosophy) and as action (praxis) were for him inseparable—as is only natural, given the anthropology of Sein und Zeit. He was lucky, because in his lifetime a political movement promising total transformation did appear on the German and European stage, so that compromises were not needed. On the political map of contemporary Europe Heidegger would not have found a movement measuring up to his stringent criteria. * In contrast to Heidegger, Žižek’s political activity has been much more prone to compromises, even to being “reasonable”. The best known is his run to be included in the 4-person presidential council of Slovenia in 1990, as a part of the liberal democrat ticket. Žižek, who calls himself a communist and a radical leftist, has explained that the co-operation with liberal democrats was necessitated by the situation15: the goal was to stall the advance of a coalition of nationalists and excommunists. A similar reasoned situation-awareness characterises Žižek’s actions 10

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as a public intellectual. He is always provocative and uses cognitive dissonance as a pedagogical tool, but often—for instance, while appearing on Al-Jazeera or the BBC—he reins in his neurotic ticks, refrains from alienating the audience and is quite polite. As a political actor Žižek is two different things, one in the West and another in his native Slovenia. In the West his role is that of a public intellectual. He gives interviews, writes columns and opinion pieces, takes part in debates and makes interventions in conferences, and frequently lends his support to political movements and campaigns, such as the Occupy movement in New York or the Syriza coalition in Greece. However, in the West he has not taken part in party politics, has not run for office or aspired to political leadership, unlike in Slovenia. In Slovenia, the public opinion sees him as a liberal suspected of hard-line communist sympathies. In the West, the public perception is the opposite: Žižek is seen as a communist but suspected of covert liberalism. In Slovenia, Žižek’s role as a public intellectual started through writing for the Mladina newspaper and through his participation in the radical art scene, for instance, as part of the support for the Laibach collective.16 Žižek was further drawn to action through Mladina in 1988, when four of its editors were accused of holding secret military documents. Žižek supported the editors and founded the Council for the Support of Human Rights. At the same time he left the communist party. After Slovenia gained independence, Žižek supported first the liberal democratic party and then the centre-left liberal Zares party that splintered off from the liberal democrats. Underlining this attachment is Žižek’s friendship with the founder of Zares, Gregor Golobic. Many leftist Slovenians have been irritated by Žižek’s support for the liberal democrats, who in government were involved in corruption scandals, and by his support for the “yes”-vote in the election on NATO membership. At the same time, some have suspected that Žižek is a Trojan horse, carrying a Stalinist core under the liberal veneer—a reputation that has tarnished also Golobic because of his connection to Žižek. When Žižek in the Western media insists that one good measure against global capitalism is the collective ownership of the means of production, it is obvious that his alliance with the liberal democrats that in Slovenia supported the privatisation of nationalised industries seems odd. His reply is simple enough (from Lovink 1995, no page numbers): What the liberal democratic party did was a miracle. Five years ago we were the remainder of the new social movements, like feminist and ecological groups. At that time everybody thought that we would be vanishing mediators. We made some solidly corrupted, but good moves and now we are the strongest party. I think it was our party that saved Slovenia from the faith of the other former Yugoslav republics, where they have the one-party model. Either right wing like in Croatia or left wing like in Serbia, which hegemonised in the name of the national interest. With us it’s a real diverse, pluralist scene, open towards 11

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foreigners (of course there are some critical cases). But the changes [sic] of a genuine pluralist society are not yet lost. […] The question is: will we become just another small, stupid, nationalistic state or maintain this elementary, pluralistic opening? And all compromises are worth for this goal. Pluralism and multiculturalism are in practice more important than collective ownership of the means of production, and avoiding virulent nationalism more important than state socialism. So far so good! This should be kept in mind when assessing the militancy of Žižek as a theorist: in practice, he is very committed to the ideals of anti-racism and anti-nationalism. Even if he provokes audiences with the ideas of totalitarianism, when push comes to shove he opts for a Popperian “open society”. This might be something of a disappointment. When it comes to everyday politics, a big part of Žižek’s theoretical flair and flamboyance is lost and turns into rather familiar progressivism: no decisive breaks, no once-and-for-all swipes, but calculated choices for the lesser evil. This should be considered in combination with the characteristic move Žižek makes at the decisive moments of his talks and texts. He analyses, points out the antinomies and dead-ends, shows the hidden impossibilities, but provides no answers. Rather, in the end, Žižek says: “I’m just pointing out that we can not continue like this, but I don’t know what we should do!” Here, Žižek is a much more traditional philosopher than Heidegger. Žižek is a gadfly, raising questions and provoking problems, showing the limitations of our knowledge and practices—but leaving the rest open. Maybe more precisely a psychoanalytic gadfly, luring us into the thick of the problem, clarifying some obstacles, showing some structural guidelines, and then disappearing and leaving us staring into the mirror. The task of taking up the collective discipline that saves the world from rapacious global capitalism is left to the reader, the listener, to us. HEIDEGGERIAN MARXISM AND ŽIŽEK AS THE NEW MARCUSE?

Contrary to still too prevalent prejudice, Heidegger’s phenomenology and Marxism are not like oil and water. There are important areas of contact, common starting points and shared concerns. Both Heidegger and Marx see work and everyday life as ontologically and politically decisive. They agree, as well, on the essentially historical nature of knowledge and existence.17 This means that meaningful change has to happen collectively and practically. For both, the task of philosophy begins with everyday life—and philosophy also has to end up being relevant to everyday life in order to be worth its name. To be sure, there are decisive differences in the analyses the two philosophers present, but the fact that Heidegger agreed that the old bourgeois order had failed to solve the “worker question”18 and that liberalism was not the answer, means that the two face at least one crucial problem in common: how is social life to be organised in the industrialised and modern age, beyond the confines of individualism, liberalism and purely calculative reason? 12

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Consequently, there have been several attempts at building a “leftist Heidegger”. This has often meant dissociating Heidegger’s phenomenology from what has sometimes—and mistakenly—been seen as its coolly philosophical distance from politics. For instance, most of the French reception laboured for decades under the impression that a proper interpretation of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology was by necessity leftist. In this context it is significant that one of the earliest and most prominent synthesisers of Marx and Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, who in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s wrote a series of articles that have been recently collected under the title Heideggerian Marxism (Marcuse 2005), himself thought that no Nazi sympathies were visible in Heidegger’s work before 1933 (Marcuse 2005, 169, 176). After 1933, however, Marcuse had no illusions with regard to Heidegger’s politics, and quickly wound down the project of combining Heidegger with Marxism (see Marcuse 2005, 159), even though it may be argued that phenomenological insights continued to inform his later work. One indication of Marcuse’s thorough disillusionment with Heidegger is his vigorous post-war effort towards getting Heidegger to reflect on Nazism; an effort unparalleled by any of Heidegger’s students or disciples. Marcuse wanted to develop a more “concrete” Heideggerianism, in terms of an analysis of the emptiness of bourgeois life and its overcoming through an active relationship to life, which he finds better described in Marx, especially in his writings on alienation. As Marcuse (2005, 165-166) himself puts it: we saw in Heidegger […] a new beginning, the first radical attempt to put philosophy on really concrete foundations—philosophy concerned with human existence, the human condition, and not merely with abstract ideas and principles. Marcuse interprets Heidegger’s Dasein as a collective subjectivity that can act historically in the Marxist sense. Here, in worldly Dasein, the otherwise crippling distinction between subject and object can be overcome, and a processual and historical existence becomes possible. However, for Marcuse, Heidegger’s mistake was too much abstraction and “ontologisation” that rapidly increase after a promising start in Being and Time. His final verdict is clear and merciless: If you look at his principle [sic] concepts […] Dasein, das Man, Sein, Seiendes, Existenz, they are “bad” abstracts in the sense that they are not conceptual vehicles to comprehend the real concreteness in the apparent one. They lead away. For example, Dasein is for Heidegger a sociologically and even biologically ‘neutral’ category (sex differences don’t exist!); the Frage nach dem Sein remains the ever unanswered but ever repeated question; the distinction between fear and anxiety tends to transform very real fear into pervasive and vague anxiety. Even his at first glance most concrete existential category, death, is recognized as the most inexorable brute fact only to be made into an insurpassable possibility. Heidegger’s existentialism is indeed 13

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a transcendental idealism compared with which Husserl’s last writings […] seem saturated with historical concreteness. (Marcuse 2005, 167-168) In an important way Marcuse’s analysis is close to Heidegger’s self-criticism. Heidegger came to see the attempt at fundamental ontology in Being and Time as mistaken, precisely because it strove towards ahistorical and supposedly neutral structural descriptions. From this perspective, Heidegger’s public political writings, speeches and engagement in the 1930’s can be seen as a corrective against such “transcendentalism”; the “right step”, as Žižek calls it. We will return to the issue of Heidegger’s apparent withdrawal from politics after the Second World War. For now, suffice it to remember that, as noted above, in the Spiegel interview Heidegger emphasised that the crucial question for him was political. Marcuse’s summary of Heidegger’s philosophy, written in 1934, illuminates the issue: It should be noted that phenomenology’s radical move into the realm of facticity would, on the one hand, soon be redirected toward the transcendental and, on the other hand, lead immediately to the political ideology of racist Germany. Already in Heidegger’s principal work, Being and Time, the radical motifs are submerged beneath the transcendental currents. (2005, 159) How could Heidegger’s phenomenology be split towards both transcendentalism and immediate political action if it did not contain some of the promised concreteness and historical acumen? Certainly, from Marcuse’s perspective Heidegger’s political trajectory was wrong, “ideological” in the sense of containing false consciousness. However, from Heidegger’s own perspective he was continuously struggling to find the openings through which thinking is world-historical. The supposed “false consciousness” of transcendentalism arises because Heidegger does not place the driving force of history in economic questions and class antagonism like Marcuse. However, as we will see below, this does not mean that Heidegger’s account of history would be non-antagonistic or non-dynamic. Indeed, the importance of concretely political openings in Heidegger’s thinking can be made clearer through another obvious hinge in Heideggerian Marxism, the proximity between Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness from 1923 and Being and Time. We do not have to go as far as Lucien Goldmann (1977) who suggests that Being and Time is in great part a reply to Lukács, to observe salient points of contact. Again, like Žižek (2000, 107-108) notes, the shared background are the themes of alienation and reification. The problem is seen in a similar light: the nature of work and therefore of all everyday existence in modern (industrial, capitalist, technological) civilisation leads towards alienation. Consequently, the solution is seen in similar terms. Human action, praxis, is what overcomes the subject-object, nature-consciousness division. For Lukács, the distinction is overcome in a praxis led by experience saturated by class consciousness. Here, the world includes an actor, the proletariat as a social class, that is historically rooted and at the same time able to seize the moments when history can be changed. Žižek (2000) emphasises Lukács’ 14

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Leninism, his account of the voluntarist, active, and practical-engaged nature of revolutionary commitment. These are all themes found in Being and Time, where the road towards authentic historicity goes through a collective and engaged choosing of destiny, and enacting that choice in lived practices. However, once again, for Heidegger the crucial experience is not that of a social class, but rather of a people that has grasped its Being-historical destiny. Schematically put, relieved from false ideology authentic human experience is, for Lukács (and, consequently, for Marcuse and other Western Marxists), class-historical and, for Heidegger, Being-historical. This is a tension that persists between Heideggerian phenomenology and Marxism. Marxism typically sees in Heidegger an ontology that tries to be too a-historical and general. As Žižek (2000, 112), echoing Marcuse, puts it, the problem is losing the specificity of historical events to ponderous generalisations (such as Heidegger’s contention that Bolshevism and Americanism are essentially the same). Furthermore, this neglect of concrete history can then be taken to mean an ideological perversion, in the sense that Heidegger’s description of authenticity and inauthenticity concern a particular type of bourgeois subjectivity. As Marcuse (2005, 29) argues, inauthenticity is also tied to division of labour. From the Heideggerian perspective, in turn, it can be claimed that the problem with Marxism is that it does not recognise how forms of alienation arise also in non-Capitalist structures of production.19 We shall return to this tension, but for now its existence can be taken to indicate that rather than strictly contradicting or undermining each other, the Heideggerian and Marxist perspectives can be seen as complementary. Furthermore, the similarity between Marcuse’s and Žižek’s criticisms of Heidegger’s ahistoricality points to deeper commonalities between the two. As several writers (e.g., Sharpe 2004, 2005, Day 2004) have noted, there is an interesting parallel between the historical context of Žižek’s work and the work of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. Sharpe (2004, 9-10) explains how both the Frankfurt school in the 1930’s and Žižek in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s faced a situation in which existing Marxist theory lacked purchase, where, generally speaking, the right was ascendant and the left lacking both in power and ideas. Given this similarity in context and the accompanying similarities in background—including Marxism, psychoanalysis, and, up to a point, Heideggerian phenomenology—it is little wonder that the Frankfurt School thinkers and Žižek also converge in seeing one of the most important fields for philosophy in the critique of ideology and culture. If, as Sharpe (2004, 10) puts it, “Žižek faces a contemporary analogue of the theoretical impasse” that the Frankfurt School grappled with, the parallels between Freudian Marxism and Lacanian Marxism as solutions are also considerable. The critique of political economy, civilisational or cultural critique and critique of ideology are the vital fields that receive various amounts of emphasis in the various stages of the different thinkers, but together form a persistent focus. In Sharpe’s (2004) analysis Marcuse is a kind of precursor to Žižek, up to the point that Žižek’s conclusion—Sharpe calls the conclusion a dead-end: either a cynical dismissal of politics or a leftist voluntarism—can already be found in Marcuse. The 15

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fundamental problem Sharpe sees in both Marcuse and Žižek is connected to the way in which they proceed with a critique of ideology. By analysing ideology as a total phenomenon that saturates modern life, they end up in a position of “if I succeed, I fail”. Through offering robust explanations of how revolutionary action has failed and how capitalism is able to neutralise all subversion, Western Marxism at the same time succeeds in pointing out how all resistance is futile. In a sense, if Lacan’s explicitly apolitical and structuralist psychoanalysis does give to Žižek’s account augmented powers of precision and sophistication, it at the same time threatens to push the goalposts of actual political action even further away. As Sharpe (2004, 12, see also 254) writes: to the extent that one manages to map the totalistic systematicity of social reproduction, one to the same extent flirts with ‘explaining away’ the possibility of any futural transformative political agency. Correspondingly, there is the continuing problem of pinpointing the agent of revolutionary struggle in a way that would be at the same time theoretically grounded and politically viable. It has been hard, both for the Frankfurt School and for Žižek to find social groups, not to speak of a class, that would at the same time be in the position of revolutionaries, as designated by the theory, and actually willing to embrace a revolutionary consciousness. Žižek has repeatedly named the excluded, such as slum-dwellers, forced to lead a “rootless existence, deprived of substantial links” (2000, 140, see also 2005b) as the contemporary proletariat. Likewise, Marcuse identified the revolutionary potential in marginal groups not yet integrated into the one-dimensional society. However, as Sharpe points out, the position of these groups does by no means automatically lead to proletarisation; quite the contrary: “Abjection can lead to depoliticisation, or even the conservative desire just ‘to get one foot in the door’” (2004, 234). Consequently, Sharpe (2004, 12) sees both Marcuse and Žižek in a vacillating position between resigned cynical determinism and voluntarism. As we will see later, in Žižek this oscillation seems to be stabilising towards an explicit embrace of voluntarism; also because he sees in Heidegger’s best political philosophy a Lukácsian embrace of the need for decisive action that in itself creates its own conditions of success. THE PROBLEM WITH THE LIBERAL SUBJECT

Even the critics of Heidegger admit that one of his lasting contributions is the idea that Being is historical. In other words, Being and time are connected in a way that makes Being historical. Human being (Da-sein)20 is the place (Da) where Being is unconcealed, unconcealed in general and unconcealed in a particular way as this or that. It is unconcealed as humans bring about a world, not by doing or being busy but by being in time, being in a way that is permeated with time. This is the only way in which humans can be. Human being is always already historical, it is born and it is mortal. Being has its history, unlike in traditional philosophy that saw the most 16

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essential metaphysical categories as eternal. This description of the historical nature of Being and the mortality of human being has saturated almost all of the 20th century philosophy after Heidegger. The fundamentally political nature of metaphysics (and all thinking and philosophy) follows already from the connection between Being and time. However, the inseparability of metaphysics and politics can be illustrated more clearly by noticing how the history of Being also entails a certain locality of Being. If the understandings of Being that humans have change according to the temporal history of Being, they also change according to the spatial history of Being. In other words, spatially separated kinds of Dasein that exist simultaneously in physical clock-time contain different historical understandings of Being, for precisely the same reasons that temporally separate kinds of Dasein that exist in the same physical coordinates contain different historical understandings of Being. If, for instance, the understanding of Being in classical Greek antiquity is different from the understanding of Being in 18th century Europe (including Greece), so too (and for the same reason!) the understanding of Being in 18th century Greenland is different from the understanding of Being in 18th century Germany (not that either Greenland or Germany existed in the 18th century). Heidegger would not use “Greenland” as an example. Rather, he speaks of “Kaffirs”, “Semitic nomads” and “Russians” as examples of non-German and non-European understandings of Being.21 Times have changed, and maybe it would not be useful to contrast the “Greenlandic” and “German” understandings of Being in the 19th or 20th centuries, simply because the European pressure on Greenland has begun to bear fruit, unifying the lives and modes of being. The same goes for “Russia”, “Kaffirs”, and so on. In any case, Heidegger leaves no room for doubt about this spatial/local aspect of different understandings of Being. One well-known example is his fascination with Far-Eastern traditions of thought,22 and in the Spiegel-interview he uses this trope in establishing a special task for GermanEuropean thought in overcoming the metaphysics of subjectivity. The historical and local nature of understandings of Being (of metaphysics in general, of the questions “why is there something rather than nothing?”, “what is (there)?”, “what is Being?”) mean for Heidegger that the subject-object distinction that modern European rationality assumes as a universal hallmark of objectivity and truth has to be discarded. Heidegger’s criticism of the metaphysics of subjectivity is one with his criticism of liberalism. The first could be called the anthropological and the second the political wing of the Heideggerian grand critique. For Heidegger, to think of humans and to act as a human according to the view that to be human is to be a subject that through her or his senses gains a view to a separate world, gathers information about it and ultimately knowledge of separate objects, is only one possible way among many others; a way that has a history in the sense that it has not always existed and not always will.23 This is the first step. The subject-object distinction is neither a universal truth (about human being, for instance) nor any kind of (say, epistemic or scientific) necessity. The starting point for this Heideggerian step is the obvious experiential fact that humans do live and experience without the 17

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subject-object distinction (for instance, in anxiety). Subjects and objects do exist, to be sure, since living according to the subject-object distinction is one human possibility. The subject is something that can be created by living in a particular way. A second, important step follows. The subject-object distinction contains a necessary perversion, since the subject (or, more generally, the distinction) does not do what it is supposed to do. The subject is a human possibility, but a bad one, because it perverts human being. The reason for the perversion is again easy to see. The subject contains a circularity that theories based on the subject-object distinction are unable to acknowledge. Here we have to be precise. Heidegger does not object to circularity, as such. In a famous way he makes circularity a positive part of the hermeneutic method (Being and Time, §2). Rather, the problem is that the circularity included in the subject-object distinction goes unnoticed, or, even worse, repressed, and the distinction gets presented as a scientifically objective or philosophically necessary starting point. The problems following from the unacknowledged nature of the circularity can be pointed out in many ways. Maybe one of the clearest is to start from a criticism of natural science. Like his mentor Husserl24 before him, Heidegger insists throughout his career that natural science is circular in a way that it itself is unable to recognise. Natural science claims that the subject and the object are something discovered in nature. It claims that nature consists of things (entities, objects) and that the human doing science—or the scientific community, or the community of rational beings, or any other subject of science—is also a thing, for instance, a brain, or a mind, or something similar. However, in fact, the subject-object division has to be presupposed for there to be natural science in the first place. Without the distinction (typical)25 natural science is not possible (measurement is impossible, objects can not be individuated, separated, categorised, the influence of the researcher on the environment can not be controlled, etc.). So what happens is that features of the silently presupposed subject-object distinction get mixed up with the supposedly objective and non-circular results of science. Also the supposedly objective knowledge about the distinction (or of subjectivity or of objectivity) itself is tainted by the circularity. In a crude and absolutely binding way this is the reason for the fact that natural science is unable to recognise the will to power and technological manipulation inherent in its pursuit of objective knowledge. The subject, the object and “thingness” are not discovered in nature, but presupposed in order for natural science to be possible. Furthermore, for natural science to gain its authority, the presupposition has to be denied. The result is a perversion of scientific activity and of all knowledge based on the subject-object distinction. In philosophy the unacknowledged nature of the circularity can be seen in the view that philosophy should be about the maximally unambiguous communication of propositional information between rational subjects. A particularly bad case of this perversion Heidegger sees in Descartes, who in an unabashed way lays the foundation of philosophy on a thinking (doubting) subject. Heidegger uses huge amounts of time and pages in order to show that many philosophically interesting and decisive 18

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moves have been made long before we are anywhere near this kind of self-conscious ego, pondering the idea of a perfect God. At the same time the ego, the subject, is only a tiny speck in the sea of human experience. For Heidegger, the Cartesian ego is punctual, ahistoric and spiritless. In 1933 (GA36/37, 42-43), Heidegger groups the things overlooked by Descartes into four different sets: action, decisiveness, historicity and being-with (Handeln, Entschiedenheit, Geschichtlichkeit, Mitdasein). It is noteworthy that all four have to do with the social and embodied, i.e., nonindividual and non-intellectual, aspects of human being. All of this comes before the ego and forms part of the stuff from which the ego is formed, and all of this is overlooked by Cartesian modern philosophy, and therefore continues to fester inside the supposedly sanitised notion of subjectivity. Consequently, unwittingly and often to its own considerable surprise such Cartesian thinking ends up as an errand-boy for individualism and nihilism26, in the same way that supposedly neutral natural science unwittingly and to its sometimes great consternation ends up supporting the technological domination and destruction of nature. Because this issue is so crucial, let us attend to another long quote from Heidegger. Here he explicates the circularity point by point, this time in terms of “culture”, or, as Žižek would call it, ideology. The topic is racist thinking—and here we at the same time encounter the clear fact that Heidegger was not and could not have been a biological racist27: Racial breeding is a measure undertaken by power. It can be instigated and stopped by power. It bases its proclamations and ways of operating on the prevailing conditions of power and domination. Its is not in any way an ‘ideal’ as such, because as an ideal it should lead to an abandonment of claims to power and to a preservation of ‘biological’ traits. So, strictly observed, in every kind of racial thinking we see already an inbuilt thought of racial supremacy. The supremacy is grounded in different ways, but always on something that the ‘Race’ has achieved, when the achievements are measured by the yardsticks of ‘culture’ or something similar. But how, when culture—in the narrow sense of racial thinking itself—is itself a product of the Race? (The circle of subjectivity). Here the circle of subjectivity, that has forgotten itself, comes clearly to the fore, not as something that contains only the metaphysical determination of the I, but as the determination of all human being in relation to beings and to itself. (GA69, 70-71)28 Racial thinking can not think race objectively, neither as biological nor as cultural. In biology, it sees traits to be avoided or eradicated, even though it should see biological traits, in culture it sees achievement and degeneration through the lenses of the culture doing the study. This because the idea of race contains the circularity of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Race does science on race and tries to hide this circularity. The race doing the study is already presupposed, even given a privileged position, and therefore it muddles up all the ostensibly “neutral” results—in this case impinging them with a will to power included in the idea of racial supremacy. 19

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Like Heidegger points out, this is not a problem peculiar to racial thinking, but rather a problem characterising all thinking based on the subject-object distinction. The same circularity can be found in contemporary natural science that often flatters itself by imagining it has left crudities like racial thinking behind. Often, for instance, natural science explains human behaviour by genes, without realising that here, again, genes are studying genes and explaining genes by genes, and thereby silently smuggling ideas about what genes (humans) are into the ostensibly neutral results on genes (typically, the ideas include a valorisation of survival, even a commitment to the idea that survival is somehow “good”, and ideas about the causality in nature). If these are Heidegger’s philosophical reasons for objecting to a metaphysics of subjectivity, he also has a set of more direct and existential grounds for disliking the subject. For the kind of subject that freely chooses amongst a set of alternatives (according to some rational, economic, hedonistic or similar set of preferences) is, according to Heidegger, shallow and incapable of commitment. From here springs the criticism on liberalism. The crux is the idea of free choice. Something freely chosen can also be freely unchosen, discarded, forgotten. Nothing makes the liberal individual responsible. The liberal individual is always ready to change its choices, including changing itself, in a chameleon-like manner reflecting the freely available circumstances. Against this, Heidegger holds that a deeper and truer human being is rooted in a layer of (partly non-human) meanings that bind without the conscious or intellectual part of an individual having any final veto on what the meanings make us responsible to or responsible for. The kind of subject incapable of commitment Heidegger calls freischwebende, free-floating, and neither as a philosopher nor as a private person (sic) does he have anything good to say about modern individualism. To be free of the bounds of responsibility towards the world and God, to be free of the bottomless danger and horror of being mortal and being a people were, according to Heidegger, simply signs of degeneration. The name for this degeneration is “freefloating and rationally choosing individual”. In philosophy the degeneration takes the form of a safe and disengaged (ungefährliches und unverplichtetes) analysis of any and all problems without any need or pressing emergency (Notwendigkeit und Not, GA36/37, 6).29 What, then, do Heidegger and Žižek fear? They do not resist liberal capitalism and individualism because they would be somehow illusory. On the contrary, liberalism is a really existing phenomenon. When it comes to technology, Heidegger is not afraid that technology would break down but rather that it works without a hitch. The same goes for liberal capitalism: the problem is not that it wouldn’t work but rather that it functions very well. Like Žižek repeatedly notes citing Frederic Jameson, today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.30 Heidegger’s and Žižek’s enemy is precisely the self-evident ease with which liberalism reigns. That is why we need a totally transformative experience—a revolution.

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NOTES 1 Žižek: “One is tempted to risk a hyperbole and to affirm that, in a sense, everything, from the fate of so-called ‘Western civilization’ up to the survival of humanity in the ecological crisis, hangs on the answer to this related question: is it possible today, apropos of the postmodern age of new sophists, to repeat mutatis mutandis the Kantian gesture?” (1993, 5). Heidegger: “Nur wo das Sein sich im Fragen eröffnet, geschieht Geschichte und damit jenes Sein des Menschen […]” (GA40, 152); “Only where Being opens up as a problem, does history happen as history and humans exist as humans […]” Another, even more revealing quote from Heidegger in 1933 shows how he experienced the National Socialist revolution. Heidegger has just explained how the philosophy grounded by Plato gives a completely new way of seeing the world: “We ourselves stand today—not only after a year or so but after a number of years—in front of an even bigger decision in philosophy, a decision that is greater, wider and deeper than the decision at Plato’s time. The question is expressed in my book Being and Time. A change from the roots up. The question is whether our understanding of Being is transformed from its ground up, or not. It will be a transformation that first gives the framework for the spiritual history of our people. This can not be proven. It is a belief that must be shown to be true by history.” “Wir selbst stehen heute, nicht etwa seit einem Jahr, sondern seit einer Reihe von Jahren, in einer noch größeren Entscheidung der Philosophie, die an Größe und Weite und Tiefe noch weit über die damalige Entscheidung hinausgeht. Sie ist in meinem Buch Sein und Zeit zum Ausdruck gebracht. Eine Wandlung von Grund aus. Es handelt sich darum, ob das Verständnis des Seins sich von Grund aus wandelt. Es wird eine Wandlung sein, die allererst den Rahmen darbieten wird für die Geistesgeschichte unseres Volkes. Dies kann nicht bewiesen werden, sondern ist ein Glaube, der durch die Geschichte erwiesen werden muß.” (GA36/37, 255). Translations here and below by the author, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Heidegger is talking about experiencing language and tells, furthermore, that experience is not something controlled by humans but something that is “sent” to them: “The purpose of [the three following lectures] is to give us a possibility to have an experience of language. To experience something, be it a thing, a person, a God, means that that something happens to us, hits us, comes over us, turns us over and changes us. To talk about ‘having’ an experience does not here mean that we in some way produce the experience; having means here: to go through, to suffer, to grasp what hits us, to receive, so that we join ourselves with what comes at us. It happens, it sends itself, it joins to itself.”; “[Die folgenden drei Vortrage] möchten uns vor eine Möglichkeit bringen, mit der Sprache eine Erfahrung zu machen. Mit etwas, sei es ein Ding, ein Mensch, em Gott, eine Erfahrung machen heißt, daß es uns widerfahrt, daß es uns trifft, über uns kommt, uns umwirft und verwandelt. Die Rede vom ‘machen’ meint in dieser Wendung gerade nicht, daß wir die Erfahrung durch uns bewerkstelligen; machen heißt hier: durchmachen, erleiden, das uns Treffende vernehmend empfangen, annehmen, insofem wir uns ihm fügen. Es macht sich etwas, es schickt sich, es fügt sich.” (GA12, 149). It is interesting that Heidegger wants to talk about having or making an experience (“eine Erfahrung zu machen”), even though, for instance, in Finnish it would be easier to talk directly about experiencing (“tarkoituksena on antaa mahdollisuus kielen kokemiseen, kokemukseen kielestä”), without any “making” or “having”. In the same way the surrogate subject “Es” in the German and the “It” in the English passive voice add something unnecessary and unwanted: the “it” does not refer to an experience of language (not: “the experience happens, the experience sends itself, etc.”), rather Heidegger is talking of subjectless happening without entities (that could be rendered in Finnish without surrogate subjects: “Tapahtuu, lähetetään, liitytään”). At most, the “subject” could be Being (Sein) or happening (Ereignis) itself. However, according to Heidegger, these two do not exist, and therefore they can not be the subjects of an action: they are action, not actors. 3 Here is Žižek (2006b): “We should have no illusions: liberal communists [Žižek means people like George Soros and Bill Gates who advocate a combination of global capitalism and social and ecological responsibility] are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies—religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies—depend on contingent

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local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.” Žižek follows the leftist convention of using the term “Fascism” to denote all racist and totalitarian systems, whether they are National Socialist or Fascists. However, Heidegger’s Nazism has very little in common with Mussolini’s Fascism, and the catch-all term “Fascism” in not appropriate in this context. It is typical that Heidegger comments on timely political issues in the midst of deep and abstract philosophical passages. For instance, while ruminating on how humans try to relate to their environment by trying to form a picture of the world, Heidegger starts blaming publishers for too commercial concerns and academic people for too much unnecessary travels to conferences (GA5, 98). The scandalous claim—we will return to it below—that extermination camps are part of the same phenomenon as industrial agriculture is made in the middle of a meditation of the essence of technology, knee-deep in the etymologies of Greek, Latin and German terms. After Being and Time, the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie) is sometimes counted as Heidegger’s second major opus. It is, on the whole, a rather esoteric and fragmentary work, but it is peppered with surprising quips on the true nature of Bolshevism and the essence of Americanism (GA65, 54, 149). In the 1943 afterword to the tour-de-force Was ist Metaphysik?, in which Heidegger brilliantly explains the importance of nothingness for thinking of Being, he rather abruptly starts talking about readiness for and the importance of sacrifice (this immediately after the battle of Stalingrad). Most purist and orthodox Heideggerians may pass by these kinds of sentences as “individual cases”, but the truth is that Heidegger almost always carried two threads throughout his lectures and writings: a linguistic and philosophical one, and an acutely political and contemporary one. The glue keeping these two together is the third element: experientiality. “Der Schriftsteller Kolbenheyer sagt: ‘Dichtung is eine biologisch notwendige Funktion des Volkes’. Es braucht nicht viel Verstand, um zu merken: das gilt auch von der Verdauung, auch sie ist eine biologisch notwendige Funktione eined Volkes, zumal eines gesunden. Wenn Spengler die Dichtung als Ausdruck der jeweiligen Kulturseele faßt, dann gilt dies auch von der Herstellung von Fahrräden und Automobilen. Das gilt von allem, d.h. es gilt gar nicht. […] Das alles ist so trostlos flach, daß wir nur mit Widerwillen davon reden. Aber wir müssen darauf hinzeigen. Denn erstens betrifft diese Denkweise nicht nur die Dichtung, sondern alle Geschehnisse und Seinsweisen des menschlichen Daseins, weshalb mit diesem Leitfaden leicht kulturphilosophische und Weltanschauungsgebäude errichtet werden. Zweitens beruht diese Denkweise nicht auf der zufälligen Flachheit und dem Unvermögen des Denkens Einzelner, sondern sie hat ihre wesentlichen Gründe in der Seinsart des Menschen des 19. Jahrhunderts und der Neuzeit überhaupt. Wenn etwas mit dem viel mißbrauchten Titel ‘liberalistisch’ belegt werden kann und muß, dann ist es diese Denkweise. Denn sie stellt sich grundsätzlich und im vorhinein aus dem, was sie meint und denkt, heraus, macht es zum bloßen Gegenstand ihres Meinens. Dichtung ist so eine unmittelbar antreffbare Erscheinung, die es unter anderem gibt und welche Erscheinung, wie jede andere, dann durch die ebenso gleichgültige Bestimmung als ‘Ausdruckerscheinung’ der dahinter brodelden Seele aufgefaßt wird. Erscheinungen sind uns Ausdruck. Ausdruck ist auch das Bellen des Hundes. Diese Denkweise ist in sich der Vollzug einer gar bestimmten Seinsweise des ‘liberalen’ Menschen. Sie hat sich bis auf dem heutigen Tag in einer Unzahl von Abwandlungen und Gestalten in der Vorherrschaft gehalten, zumal sie leicht eingeht, niemanden angeht und bequem überall zu gebrauchen ist.” (GA39, 27-28). Heidegger writes on liberalism in philosophy: “Höningswald comes from the neo-Kantian school, which advocates a philosophy that is tailored for liberalism. Here the essence of humans is dissolved into a free-floating consciousness that, in turn, is in the end diluted to a common and logical World-Reason. In this way, through supposedly strictly philosophical reasons the gaze is averted from the historical rootedness of humans and from the transmission of their national provenance based on blood and homeland. To this was connected a conscious withdrawal from all metaphysical ques-

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tioning, and humans were seen only as servants to a neutral, generic World-Culture.”; “Hönigswald kommt aus der Schule des Neukantianismus, der eine Philosophie vertreten hat, die dem Liberalismus auf dem Leib zugeschnitten ist. Das Wesen des Menschen wurde da abgelöst in ein freischwebendes Bewußtsein überhaupt und dieses schließlich verdünnt zu einer allgemein logischen Weltvernunft. Auf diesem Weg wurde unter scheinbar streng wissenschaftlicher philosophischer Begründung der Blick abgelenkt vom Menschen in seiner geschichtlichen Verwurzelung und seiner volkhaften Überlieferung seiner Herkunft aus Boden und Blut. Damit Zusammen ging eine bewußte Zurückdrängung jedes metaphyschischen Fragens, und der Mensch galt nur doch als Diener einer indifferenten, allgemeinen Weltkultur.” Heidegger’s letter to Einhäuser, 25. June 1933, quoted in Faye (2009, 37). “Es ist für mich heute eine entscheidende Frage, wie dem technischen Zeitalter überhaupt ein—und welchen—politisches System zugeordnet kann”. (Interview “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”, Der Spiegel, 1976, 206). Heidegger continues by noting that democracy does not seem to be the right kind of system, because democracy sees technology as a human tool, “[etwas], was der Mensch in der Hand hat” (ibid.). In contrast, Heidegger thinks that technology—like poetry!—is something that constitutes humans, and therefore something that humans alone can not overcome. “Against the unstoppable power of technology, ‘cells’ of resistance will be built, cells, which inconspicuously guard thinking and prepare for the turn […]”; “Gegen die unaufhaltsame Macht der Technik werden sich überall “Zellen” des Widerstands bilden, die unauffällig die Besinnung wachhalten und die Umkehr vorbereiten […]” (Zollikoner Seminare 1987, 352). Petzet (1993, chapter 3 and 77ff), Heidegger (2005, 267). Heidegger took part in the internal power struggles of the National Socialist movement. Certainly, he wasn’t one of the most adept tacticians or most hardened spin-doctors, but he knew the strategic balance in its overall shape, tried to recognise right moments for action and knew also when he was beaten. The descriptions of the details can be found in Ott (1993), Farias (1991) and Faye (2009). Or what should we make of the fact that during the final months of the Second World War, Heidegger planned a kind of time capsule, a bomb-proof metal container, filled with the best parts of Hölderlin’s and his own writings, to be preserved in a castle tower along the banks of the Donau? (Heidegger 2005, 237) In his letters to Elfride in 1944-45 Heidegger returns several times to this theme: the only meaningful task is to collect the most important of his writings so that future generations have at least some seeds of thinking and plain language, so that the victory of mechanicalness and technology will not be complete (2005, 225, 229, 233, 235-237). He fears that for one reason or another he will not be able to work after the war and therefore the only hope lies in the texts that have already been written; the texts that he together with his brother Fritz catalogues and edits on his mountain cabin and in Meßkirch. “Wer groß denkt, muß groß irren.” (1954, 17). All the members of Heidegger’s immediate family were National Socialists. Elfride Heidegger was active in several local National Socialist organisations and on the national level belonged to the circle of Erica Semmler, the leader of NS-Frauenschaft. (Heidegger 2005, 193) “Together with my friends I support the ‘Liberal Democratic Party’, which is more conservative than I am myself. But it is the only center strength, and we want to prevent that here, as in the other countries of ex-Yugoslavia, there is only the one dangerous choice: old-style communism or nationalism.” Kunisch (1999). Žižek’s connection to radical performance art should not be forgotten. He is not just a fan and a supporter, but commits practical jokes or mini-performances. He has, for instance, told that he has faked official letters, documents and articles (Žižek & Daly 2004, 38). He has also been caught using careless or made-up quotations (see, e.g., “Žižek on Chomsky: Black, white, and red all over” http:// harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004183), and it is by no means clear how reliable his stories of his own life are. Famously, in the Letter on Humanism from 1946, Heidegger commends Marx for having reached an essential understanding—superior to that by Husserl or Sartre—of history through the theme of alienation (GA9, 339-340). Marcuse points out that Heidegger wrote the letter while Freiburg and

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the surroundings were occupied by the French, and adds: “I don’t give much weight to this remark” (2005, 167). Political calculations by both Beaufret and Heidegger certainly influenced the genesis of the “Letter”. Still, there is little reason to doubt that Heidegger at least could have meant what he said. Heidegger’s talks of Bismarck and the proletariat in a 1933-34 lecture series, cited in Faye (2009, 141, 370). Indeed, as Mikko Niemelä (2013, 217) has pointed out, Lukács’ later self-criticism towards History and Class Consciousness can also be read as signalling that not all reification is reducible to a capitalist mode of production, thus opening a door for a wider, “Heideggerian” account of alienation. My account of Heideggerian Marxism here relies heavily on Niemelä’s work. Heidegger’s term Dasein does not mean an individual, a person, but a way of being shared and lived by several humans. This has often been misunderstood, not the least because Heidegger in Being and Time says that Dasein is always mine (je meines). However, he does not mean that for each individual there would be one Dasein (so that I, for instance, would own my Dasein which therefore would be mine). Rather, the point is that Dasein exists only as engaged, as committed: a particular Dasein is mine in the sense that a hero is my hero. Without this kind of commitment, without the fact that someone lives/is a Dasein, that particular Dasein does not exits. Heidegger puts the same point also in the following way: “That such a way of being human is always mine does not meant that this Being becomes ‘subjectivised’, limited to a detached individual and defined through the individual.”: “Daß solches Sein des Menschen je das meine ist, bedeutet nicht, dieses Sein werde ‘subjektiviert’, auf den abgelösten Einzelnen beschränkt und von ihnen aus bestimmt.” cited in Faye (2009, 360) Kaffirs (GA38, 81, 83), semitic nomads; Faye (2009, 144), Russians; Heidegger (1976). Such as the Chinese Taoist tradition, see May (1996). In the famous dialogue, “Zur Erörterung der Gelassenheit. Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken”, Heidegger puts the matter like this: “The relationship between me and the object, the often mentioned subject-object relationship, that I [the speaker is the researcher, Forscher] see as the most universal, is then only a historical transformation of the relationship between humans and things, insofar as things can become objects […].” (GA13, 60): “Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Gegenstand, die oft genannte Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung, die ich für die allgemeinste hielt, ist offenbar nur eine geschichtliche Abwandlung des Verhältnisses des Menschen zum Ding, insofern die Dinge zu Gegenständen werden können […]” Husserl’s short manifesto Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft (1911) is still unsurpassed in its concise criticism of the naivete and circularity in natural science and philosophical naturalism. With regard to these themes Heidegger is always very close to Husserl. Even the quip “science does not think” by the later Heidegger is well in line with the criticism presented several decades before by Husserl. But maybe non-classical natural science is possible: for instance, the thought based on complementarity that Niels Bohr advocated may be able to find ways of doing natural science without the naïve subject-object distinction, see Plotnitsky (2002, 1994), Pylkkö (1998). Nihilism, because finitude, mortality and historicality (features lacking in a Cartesian modern individual) are, according to Heidegger, necessary conditions for meaning—we will return to this below. For Heidegger, biological racism or Darwinism is, naturally, a form of liberalism: “This way of thinking [liberal biologism] is in no fundamental way different from the psychoanalysis by Freud and others. And not different from Marxism that sees the spiritual as a function of economic production […]”: “Grundsätzlich underscheidet sich diese Denkart [liberal Biologismus] in nichts von der Psychoanalyse von Freud und Konsorten. Grundsätzlich auch nicht von Marxismus, der das Geistige als Funktion des wirtschaftlichen Produktionprozess nimmt […]” (GA36/37, 211). “Rassen-pflege ist eine machtmäßige Maßnahme. Sie kann daher bald eingeschaltet bald zurückgesteltt werden. Sie hängt in ihrer Handhabung und Verkündung ab von jeweiligen Herrschafts- und Machtlage. Sie ist keineswegs ein ‘Ideal’ an sich, denn sie müßte dann zum Verzicht auf Machtansprüche führen und ein Geltenlassen jeder ‘biologischen’ Veranlagung betreiben. Daher ist streng gesehen in jeder Rassenlehre bereits der Gedanke eines Rassevorrangs eingeschlossen. Der Vorrang gründet sich

METAPHYSICS IS POLITICS verschiedenartig, aber immer auch solches, was die ‘Rasse’ geleistet hat welche Leistung den Maßstäben der ‘Kultur’ und dgl. Untersteht. Wie aber, wenn diese und zwar aus dem engen Gesichtskreis des Rassendenkens her gerechnet nur Rasseprodukt übrhaupt ist? (Der Zirkel der Subjektivität.) Hier kommt der selbstvergessene Zirkel aller Subjektivität zum Vorschein, der nicht eine metaphysische Bestimmung des Ich, sondern des ganzen Menschenwesens in seiner Beziehung zum Seienden und zu sich selbst enthält.” (GA69, 70-71) 29 Already in Being and Time (§7), Heidegger defines his phenomenology as the opposite of all kinds of freischwebende philosophical views and “problems”. 30 For instance in “The Spectre of Ideology”, the introduction to Mapping Ideology (1995), edited by Žižek.

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HEIDEGGER ON REVOLUTION

THE SUBJECT, THE WORKER, THE POLIS

In contemporary terms, Heidegger was a militant1 activist in a revolutionary movement that succeeded in toppling the old government and in establishing a new power. To be sure, the new power collapsed and, according to Heidegger, the new regime failed, even though, again according to Heidegger, maybe not much worse than those centres of power against which the revolution was done. Because Nazism has, in Derrida’s words, become a symbol for “the worst”, so that anything in any way connected with Nazism is almost taboo or at least very difficult to discuss, Heidegger’s obvious Nazism has created a near impenetrable thicket of commentary. Some want to keep Heidegger and think that the only way to do this is to resolutely deny or cover up his Nazism. Heidegger himself provided some tools for the whitewashing, though much less than some of the denialists seem to assume. The result is typically a Heidegger Light that corresponds almost too well with the wishes of the interpreters and does not present any real challenge to either liberalism or democracy. It should be asked if there is much left of Heidegger’s thought if it is purged of its awareness of crisis, its purpose of rising to the challenge of contemporary emergency (Not), and its belief that thinking has a crucial task in overcoming the crisis. Other commentators want the connection between Heidegger and Nazism to hold precisely in order to get rid of Heidegger. So, for instance, Emmanuel Faye (2009), who proposes that Heidegger’s works should be moved from the category of “philosophy” to the category of “history of Nazism”. As a Descartes scholar, Faye understands Heidegger much better than some of his apologists. However, too often Heidegger’s Nazism is emphasised in a simplified way so that one can forgo taking the effort of engaging with his thought. These are mistakes that are impossible for Žižek. As a revolutionary, he is already too close to Heidegger. He does not try to sweep Heidegger’s revolutionarity under the rug. Rather, he provocatively insists that Heidegger’s entry into real-life politics was the pinnacle of his philosophical career. Heidegger’s step was right, even though its direction was wrong, as Žižek indicates in the title of his long 2007 essay: “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933”. So the decisive question is: when Žižek defends Heidegger against a horde of critics, what exactly is he defending? In other words, what does Žižek take from Heidegger’s revolution and what does he leave? Let us begin from what is left out. The core of Faye’s overdriven but wellgrounded criticism is that Heidegger introduces Nazism to philosophy by making philosophy (or thinking) a national effort. Faye brings a lot of new and so far 27

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unanalysed material into the discussion on Heidegger’s Nazism, but to support his thesis he would actually need only one short quotation. This is Heidegger in 1933 (GA36/37, 17): To sum up: 1. Philosophy is the constant questioning struggle for the essence and Being of beings. 2. This questioning is historical, that is, it is the will of a people to demand, struggle and honour in the name of the hardness and clarity of its destiny.2 Like Faye (2009, 222-223) discovers to his horror, Heidegger is unambiguous: philosophy is essentially a national enterprise (when nation is taken in the sense on people, Volk). The struggle-filled questioning of the Being and essence of beings (i.e., the fate of a people, or, as we shall see later on, the polis of a people) in the midst of the historical situation of a people is what Heidegger calls philosophy. According to Faye, the nationalisation of philosophy is at the same time the reason for Heidegger’s revolutionary politics. Heidegger can nationalise philosophy only because he discards the universal subject. Faye never tires repeating that typically philosophy is not national precisely because thinking is for the universal reason of the universal subject. The universality here means that it does not matter if the subject philosophising or thinking is Greek, German or French, since the rational truths of philosophy are same for all subjects exercising their shared rationality.3 Consequently, for Faye, Heidegger is not a philosopher, but a Nazi disguising as one. Faye is right. If we define philosophy as the communication of propositional and conceptual claims on the basis of universally shared reason, then Heidegger is not a philosopher (or, at best, not only a philosopher). On the same grounds, Heidegger can be praised for being consistent. When the subject is abandoned as the basis of philosophy, then thinking becomes a matter of a larger non- or a-subjective field, such as the community, the people, the nation. No further steps are needed for the nationalisation of philosophy. The latter follows from the former, even though genealogically the order may be reverse in Heidegger. The national nature of thinking is for him an experiential and existential (existenziell) cornerstone which makes the critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity necessary. In contrast, Žižek has distinguished himself from the crowd of postmodernists by his staunch defence of the subject. Therefore a nationalisation of philosophy and the connection between philosophy and politics because of the nationalisation can not be a part of Žižek’s revolution. The more-than-individual in a revolution is for Žižek universal, not national. This is a crucial fork in the road. If and when Žižek claims that we need to learn from Heidegger in order to know why philosophy and politics are necessarily connected, he can not without further ado dismiss Heidegger’s reason for the connection. In other words, if Žižek leaves out from Heidegger’s revolution the nationalisation of thinking and still claims some Heideggerian inspiration for the proximity between politics and philosophy, it must be suspected that he has not understood Heidegger correctly (which, for independent reasons, is unlikely). 28

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What, precisely, is Žižek’s reason for a revolution? Why is he a revolutionary? Žižek typically presents himself as a radical, as plainspoken and brutal, but does he give a reason for revolution that is at the same time clear and well-founded? To be sure, Žižek talks of the poor and the exploited, about the dead-ends of capitalism, about the need for universal demands. But are these, as such, reasons for revolution? On the other hand, Žižek’s relative silence on the grounds for revolution is understandable and even right, given that as a philosopher of enlightenment for him the equality of humans is a self-evident starting point. To argue for equality would be a scandal in itself, because it would give credibility to the idea that humans might not be equal, after all. However, the question can be rephrased. Who does the revolution and why? The subject? A group of subjects? A collective? Is a collective something more than a collection of subjects? If the so-called radical left has lost something in the recent decades, it is the “revolutionary subject”. In addition, it has been claimed that this loss is a good thing. In the name of progress, goes the claim, we have to give up the notion of the subject because it ties the revolution into something predetermined. Here, however, Žižek is unambiguous: “I’m struggling with the problem of subjectivity, because my ultimate aim is to defend philosophically the dimension of modern Cartesian subjectivity” (in Abbott 1998). So what is Žižek’s subject like? In a nutshell, Žižek tries to both eat and save his cake. He is well aware of the postmodern critiques of the subject. According to the critique, the Cartesian modern subject is a structure of alienation, internalized control and loss of meaning. Trying to build a philosophy of the subject that is not a description of an empty structure doesn’t work either. Whenever the notion of the subject is given some particular content, problems arise. For the first, there are always people who seem like humans but do not possess that particular content (for instance, they are irrational, non-Western, suicidal, do not crave for mathematics and logic, do not strive for wholesome personhood, but rather try to systematically eradicate the ego and the subject, do not speak grammatically, do not benefit from psychoanalysis, etc.) Second, there will be theoretical grounds for arguing that the particular content is not worth aspiring to. Typically, the particular content will contain some Western, patriarchal, and bourgeois bias, against which several schools of postcolonial, feminist and postmodern thought have already extensively argued. Consequently, in a shrewd move Žižek does not want to say anything particular about the subject, does not what to define the subject in any contentful way. But he does absolutely need the subject so that the revolution (and philosophy, like Faye points out, and psychoanalysis) can be universal, not just a matter of certain time and place, of a certain non-individual collective. As a result, Žižek’s subject is what we can call “minimalist”. For Žižek, the subject is the name for the fact that the field of human experience is always already broken, incomplete, and finite. The subject as such has no independent content, it is an empty structural effect of the finitude and incompleteness of human being. Like Žižek points out while criticising Lenin’s theory of consciousness in which the mind is a kind of reflection of material reality, the problem of incomplete knowledge is not that the eye can not see itself, 29

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but rather that “seeing” or knowledge itself is possible only from the perspective of incompleteness and finitude—that is, the field of knowledge is possible only as broken. Before the brokenness, before the subject, there is no knowledge, and the finitude and incompleteness of the ontological field (i.e., the phenomenon of the subject) is the condition of possibility for epistemology. In this way Žižek tries to have it both ways. He presents a theory of the universal subject (as the condition of possibility of knowledge, in general, in terms of the finitude and incompleteness of human being) without having to say anything about the nature or content of the subject. Moreover, this ingenious move ties the Heideggerian insight of the finitude of human being together with a philosophy of subjectivity. The whole of Žižek’s universalistic and internationalistic theory of revolution is dependent on the notion of the subject. Therefore we should not let its “minimalistic” nature fool us. The minimalistic subject is not a minor addition or afterthought, not “the dot on the i”. Rather, it is the “quilting point” keeping the whole together. For Žižek’s philosophy, the importance of the minimalistic subject is maximal.4 Without it there is nothing. As noted above, the minimality of the subject means that it has no positive content, unlike in Kant, Descartes or Husserl. The Husserlian subject is maybe the best fleshed-out, one can recognise it on the street. For Husserl, the subject means that one understands the infinite tasks of mathematics and logic, and therefore the subject gives a direction to all humanity, a reason for everyone to “Europeanize” oneself.5 In contrast to this explicitly Europocentric subjectivity, the Žižekian subject is an innocuous sounding name for human finitude. In this way Žižek tries to evade the criticism against the Europocentrism of the theory of the subject. The subject is just an empty structure (or even lack of structure) without any concrete content. It is good to keep in mind that one of the most effective criticisms of all theories of the subject is the one put forward by Heidegger. According to Heidegger, all theories of what human being “necessarily” or “by nature” is are nihilistic, annihilating the groundless ground human existence has in nothing.6 In other words, all theories that say that to be human is to be this or that, to be a particular type of subject (like the infinite tasks of mathematics and logic in Husserl, public reason in KantianHabermasian enlightenment, the certainty of a thinking substance in Descartes) are, according to Heidegger, nihilist. Žižek’s theory evades this critique, because the subject in his theory is not of any particular type, not a this or a that, but just a name for an empty structure. Žižek puts his faith on the axiom that all symbolic orders need an empty signifier that does not mean anything but opens up the space for meaning. This empty space is the trace of the subject—thus the order seems to be broken by the violent introduction of the subject into the order even though properly speaking the order is possible only because of the presence of the break. In this way the question of the differences between Heidegger’s and Žižek’s philosophies of the subject gets implicated into the question of revolution. The crux is the question of the revolutionary subject, i.e., of the people. Who does the revolution, why and in what way? 30

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For Heidegger, the question is made urgent by the existential threat against the heart of Europe, against Germany. Europe is in the pincers of a single two-pronged threat, Russian Bolshevism and American pragmatism making impossible the rebirth of a true Greek-German spirit. For Heidegger, Europe is defined through a conflict or juxtaposition with the Asiatic, as expressed by Heraclitus: The name Heraclitus is not the title of a long lapsed Greek philosophy. As little is it a formula for thinking for universal humanity. Rather, it is the name for an elementary force of Western-German historical Dasein, in its first confrontation with the Asiatic. (GA39, 134)7 Heraclitus is Heidegger’s name for the European-German (the Greek root necessarily included in both Europe and Germany) Dasein and the original strength of that Dasein. In an interesting way, Heraclitus himself is in a sense Asian. He was from Ephesus and his ancestors and family may have spoken a language other than Greek. Here, the West and Europe are born in contrast to the Asiatic.8 As usual by Heidegger, the origin is a matter of contraposition (Auseinandersetung) and struggle (Kampf), not a peaceful emergence. The origin is not even something wrested through battle but something always saturated with struggle. The origin is not founded through a victory in the struggle. Rather, the origin is struggle. In the 1930’s Heidegger discusses the theme by analysing the Greek term to deinon, the violent, the horrible. The resonance between Heraclitus and to deinon is established in the following way: It is not enough to think of these basic forms of Being [being a God, being a human, being a slave, being a master] as a list of different forms; one must think them according to their original character. It means: the essence of Being is struggle, all Being goes through decisions, victories and defeats. One is not simply a God or even a human, but rather, in Being, a decision in battle has already happened and the battle has been struck into Being. One is not a slave because that is one possibility among others, but because this Being harbours a defeat, a failure, an inadequacy, a weakness, yes, maybe a will to be small and lowly. […] From this it becomes clear: struggle sits in Being and reigns from there; it makes the essence of Being, namely so that it permeates all beings with a need for decision, the constant edge of Either-Or, either them or me, either to stand or to fall. […] This struggle-filled need for decision of all Being gives beings a basic attunement which is at the same time victorious joy and will, the fearsomeness of untamed storm (resistance), grandeur and wrath in one—what we can not say with one word, recurs in the great poetry of the Tragedians as: to deinon. (GA36/37, 95)9 The quote at the same time presents an important angle on Heidegger’s interpretation on Heraclitus’ fragment 53,10 according to which polemos (strife, war) is the father and king of all things. Heidegger returns time and again to this fragment that for him is one of the cornerstones of European thought. It is good to remember the nature of polemos as the root of how Being is uncovered, when we later return to Heidegger’s ideas on Gelassenheit. To the quote above, Heidegger adds a characteristic footnote: 31

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Anxiety in its deepest deepness! Not ‘anxiousness’ and fear. Anxiety known only by the great and heroic people! […] What is resoluteness if not a condition of great and essential anxiety, otherwise it would be just a vain game without greatness and power. (GA36/37, 95)11 It may be that Heidegger emphasised the essentiality and greatness of anxiety also because his philosophy was—on the basis of superficial readings—in the 1930’s seen also as “unmanly” wallowing in negativity. Against this suspicion, Heidegger notes how essential anxiety is the origin of resoluteness, or to put it another way around: resoluteness in the face of essential anxiety is the road to greatness. Heidegger is not only talking about the “existential” mastery of anxiety displayed by a poet or thinker in the face of a contemplative or religious experience of death and nothingness, but also of war: For the essential human being, battle is the great test of all Being: in battle it is decided whether we are, from ourselves, slaves or masters […] Our race—we together with the dead comrades, in a comradeship full of secrets—is the bridge to the spiritual and historical conquest of the Great War. (GA16, 283-284)12 Nihilism can be overcome only by discarding all particular foundations for human being. Consequently, overcoming nihilism means persistence in the face of nothingness and the anxiety caused by it. (However, this is not existentialism, since what persists is not an individual, but a historical Dasein.) A human being that abides in her or his essence (Wesen),13 is someone who is shot through with essential anxiety and finds her or his resoluteness thereby. This kind of abiding or whiling (Wesen) is necessarily full of struggle, and if the ontological struggle and the existential threat (to Greek-German-European being) happen to coincide, so much the better! In this way, a war can be ontologically essential (wesentlich). Two more points from the quotation. First, the quotation displays Heidegger’s account of family or race (Geschlecht) as something that includes in a mysterious and maybe even privileged way the dead comrades. Second, it alludes to the generational experience of World War I, something that Heidegger shares with other veterans. The quote also shows how in the 1930’s Heidegger’s rhetoric of revolution combines existential battle (Germany between Russia and America, Europe against Asia) together with the idea that a people finds its greatness and heroism by standing firm on the face of nothingness and anxiety, and by taking the risk of a battle in the midst of to deinon, death, and sacrifice.14 The people contains the dead. Heidegger’s account tallies well with many forms of Nazi rhetoric, especially those of Hitler. For example, in the final scenes of Oscar Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004) we see Hitler in his Berlin bunker waiting as the Red Army advances. The generals are already trying to persuade Hitler to contemplate suing for peace or at least negotiating with the enemy, because otherwise the destructive end-battle will just go on: what will be left of Germany, if the Wehrmacht and Volksturm fight to the bitter end? Hitler replies, of course, that if Germany is to go under, then so be it. This is a very 32

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Heideggerian reply. The fatefulness of Being means that one sticks to one’s battles, is resolute and faithful, and does not start eyeing for more convenient alternatives when defeat is imminent and especially not when defeat is certain.15 Authenticity is to be found in the hardness and clarity (härte und klarheit) of one’s fate. This implies a readiness for sacrifice (Opfer). In his 1943 afterword16—written in the wake of the defeat at Stalingrad—to the rather high-strung lecture What is metaphysics?, Heidegger suddenly starts talking about sacrifice: “Sacrifice is a farewell to beings, on the way towards the preservation of the favour of Being.” Sacrificing does not have anything to do with calculation, utility or purposefulness. Rather, it gives the “grandeur of poverty”. Heidegger continues by noting that sacrifice is thanks given for the protection received from Being, and it can be seen in the willingness towards anxiety that is close to a form of indestructibility. These thoughts are impossible to separate from the on-going destruction and defeat of Nazi Germany.17 Already during World War I Heidegger brings together the war experience and spiritual purification. With his regiment he is visiting Berlin and writes to his fiancé about the “refined sexuality” evident especially on Friedrichstrasse, and how that kind of mentality makes all authentic spirituality, greatness and nearness to god impossible (2002, 72). He continues: “The war has not yet become terrible enough. The people here have lost their souls—[…].”18 So, the war and its sacrifices had a spiritual function: to eradicate decadence (the term Heidegger uses for describing Berlin) and to prepare way for a rooted (Bodenständig) culture. However, Heidegger’s hope that the war would make people turn away from individualism, hedonism and averageness was in vain. World War I was not terrible enough, and even if the Second World War was, indeed, more devastating for Germany, it was followed by an ever faster heedless plunge into liberalism and individualism and finally by a total loss of all readiness for sacrifice—as evidenced by the fact noted by Žižek that contemporary wars have no casualties, at least not on our side.19 During the 1930’s Heidegger does not shy away from militaristic language, unlike the later Heidegger whose thought on the fourfold and Gelassenheit sounds at least superficially pacifist. In the 1930’s, the difference between existential and military struggle disappears in Heidegger. Heidegger, who usually is hyper-sensitive when it comes to individual words, does not even shy away from using the word Vernichtung, extermination (GA36/37, 90-91): The enemy is everything and everyone from which or whom rises an essential threat to the Dasein of a people and its individuals. The enemy is not necessarily outside, and the outer enemy is not necessarily more dangerous. And it can even seem that there is no enemy. Then the basic requirement is to find the enemy, bring the enemy to light, or even first to create the enemy so that the enemy can be confronted and so that Dasein does not become dulled. […] The enemy may have set in the deepest root of the Dasein of a people, and work against its essence. In this case, the struggle is even harder and more difficult, for here it is by no means a question of a direct confrontation; often it is much 33

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more painstaking and slow to discover the enemy as such, to bring the enemy out, not to haste against the enemy, to keep oneself battle-ready, to constantly foster and increase preparedness and to set the attack from long beforehand with the goal of full extermination.20 Maybe the best known and clearest expression of the overlap between deeply traditional philosophy and obviously partisan politics in Heidegger is the Rektoratsrede, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”,21 given when Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University in May 1933. The speech is important because in it Heidegger presents his program for the educational renewal of German universities, at the moment when he takes an active role in structural reform with the key goal of embedding the Führerprinzip in higher education. Also, Heidegger returns to the speech repeatedly after the war while explaining his motives. The speech defines three tasks, military service, work service and knowledge service, as equally important parts of the university-Dasein. The military or defence service is connected to the struggle for national sovereignty in a way that is not particularly pacifist or gentle. Or how does it sound to hear that for everyone working or studying in an university, military defence is an essential task? Another possibly surprising feature in Heidegger’s revolutionary rhetoric is his high praise for the state, something that might be hard to guess on the basis of the writings of the later Heidegger. In the Origin of the Work of Art (GA5), Heidegger famously sees not only the work of an artist but the deed of a politician as setting a place for the truth to happen, but otherwise post-World War II Heidegger does not usually speak about politics let alone the state. However, in the 1930’s Heidegger speaks of the state in terms that should not fail to startle interpreters that see Heidegger as some kind of anarchist.22 He writes (cited in Faye 2009, 115-116), for instance: Initially we defined in a formal way, that a people is the kind of being, that is in the way and of the kind of a state, that is or can be a state. Then, we questioned further. What kind of character or form does the people give itself in a state, and the state to the people […] A kind of order? That is too general, since I can order anything, stones, books and so on. But order in the sense of domination, rank, leadership and followership describes the matter aptly.23 Here a people gets an important characteristic: it is that kind of being that exists as a state. The state, in turn, is defined by order, more precisely by rank. No wonder then that Heidegger thought that nomads and other stateless humans should be labelled “groups” rather than “peoples”. Whatever Heidegger believes in, it is not the horizontal and distributed lifestyles of nomadic or anarchist groups. The notion of rank and the implied hierarchy is interesting. For Heidegger, rank does not mean a plain order of value or a spiritual hierarchy, in which one is higher than the other. Rank not only gives a hierarchy but is also connected to leadership and followership. In a rank, the higher leads and the lower follows. The leader is an example that makes the persons lower in the hierarchy responsible for following 34

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the example.24 The order rank gives to a people is not any kind of bureaucracy or sorting, but the order of leaders and followers. The people as a state exists in the mode of leaders and followers. All other characteristics of the state (be they economic, bureaucratic, professional, related to the division of labour, etc.) are subordinate to leadership. Leadership, in turn, is spiritual and organic, not formal, institutionalised or organisational. Again, Heidegger’s idea is close to Nazi ideology, where leadership (as, for example, embodied in the Führerprinzip) replaces both the liberalist and the Bolshevist orders that are based on conceptual categories and institutional structures. Furthermore, rank as an ordering principle gets its thrust from the elementary powers that define a worker (Arbeiter). Heidegger’s notion of the worker is heavily indebted to the World War I hero Ernst Jünger, who argues in Der Arbeiter (1932) that the worker is different from the bourgeois not because of deterministic developmental succession (as in historical materialism and Marxism) or because of historical change (as in futurism or in surrealism), but rather because of the worker’s higher rank which is a consequence of the fact that the worker lives among elementary powers (elementäre Mächten; Jünger 2007, 19). By living with the elementary powers and by withstanding their pressures, the worker is capable of a freedom that is impossible for the bourgeois. All of these Jüngerian ideas are evident in Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930’s. Heidegger’s elitism is the elitism of elementary powers that make possible a unique kind of revelation of Being (anxiety, struggle and resoluteness giving form to a leadership and therefore a state). National Socialism gives Germans access to these elementary powers. The Germans become workers in a workers’ state, and the state is shaped by leadership and rank and therefore capable of a new revelation of Being. How are we to combine the claim that human existence reaches its greatest heights in a state together with the Geviert and Gelassenheit of the later Heidegger? It does not seem straightforward. But we should remember, again, that still in the Spiegelinterview Heidegger presents himself as a political thinker, for whom the essential question is the assignment of a political system for the technological age. He even takes the trouble of hinting that democracy may not be the system needed. In fact, in the atmospheric essays—say “The Thing” or “Building Dwelling Thinking”—of the later Heidegger there is nothing that would indicate that he would have reconsidered democracy or equality. On the contrary, the contours of an ideology of rank and the need to persevere in the face of nothingness and elementary powers, can be discerned even in these essays. Naturally, Heidegger derives his thinking on the state from the Greek polis. And as Žižek (2007a) rightly points out, Heidegger does not close his eyes on the inequality of the Greek polis, he does not try to romanticise the birth of democracy. Rather, Heidegger emphasises the importance of ontological rank and social inequality in the Greek origin. Žižek (2007a, 28) quotes Heidegger: If people today from time to time are going to busy themselves rather too eagerly with the polis of the Greeks, they should not suppress this side of it; 35

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otherwise the concept of the polis easily becomes innocuous and sentimental. What is higher in rank is what is stronger. Thus Being, logos, as the gathered harmony, is not easily available for every man at the same price, but is concealed, as opposed to that harmony which is always mere equalizing, the elimination of tension, levelling. Žižek leaves out the beginning of the paragraph that must be considered—not the least because it again starts and ends with Heraclitus: Because Being as logos is the original gathering, not a pile of debris or a mixture, where everything matters as much or as little, rank and dominion belong to Being. In order for Being to open itself, it must itself have and contain rank. This attitude is described by the way in which Heraclitus speaks of the many as dogs and asses. It belongs to the essence of the Greek Dasein. (GA40, 141-142)25 The Greek world is for Heidegger a world of severe agonism and a world where the masses are seen as dogs and asses without the means for a revelation of Being that would gather human existence into a whole. The strength of the “many” is in that they recognise the logos revealed by the “few”, that they follow their leaders and do not clamour for equalitarian democracy that would only work in levelling and diluting the Being of both the low and the high in rank. After the part quoted by Žižek, Heidegger ends by discussing Heraclitus’ fragment 54, which he interprets to mean that “the not (immediately and easily) apparent accord is mightier than the (commonly) obvious one”. In this way, Heidegger’s Heraclitus speaks for a hidden and severe logos and harmony, for a rank, and against a structural equality. For Heidegger, the Greek polis is not the agora, the meeting place of free and equal men, where the best argument wins in public argument. Rather, the polis is an order created by leadership and followership, based on the strength of the few in the task of the revelation of Being that gives them a higher rank. Here is Heidegger’s definition of the polis: What is polis? Status means state, status rei publicae = state of public affairs […] This state has nothing to do with polis, neither is the polis the community of the politeia. What polis is, can be experienced already in Homer’s Odysseia (VI book, poem 9 ff): “About the city he had drawn a wall, he had built houses and made temples for the gods, and divided the ploughlands.”26 So polis is the authentic centre of the area of Dasein. This centre is actually the temple and the ground on which the gathering of the politeia happens, polis is the authentically determining centre of the historical Dasein of a people, a tribe, a clan, that around which life happens; the centre to which all is drawn, the protection under which life as self-determination takes place. The essential in Dasein is self-determination. Walls, houses, land, gods. From these can the essence of the political be grasped.27

36

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Polis is the centre of human existence. It is the field of spiritual and material selfdefinition, where hierarchies of rank and significance are defined and from which they radiate to all other existence. For Heidegger the most important task for humans is to endure the uncanny and violent depths of human being and through the endurance and resoluteness to forge a gathering for the possibilities of Being (as logos). Here, artists, thinkers, poets and authentic politicians have their special task. It should be remembered that these thoughts on the state are presented in 1934, in the midst of the on-going National Socialist revolution. This context explains at least partly why Heidegger’s idea of politics is pretty much the reverse of political anarchism where political authority and the hierarchical centre of the political are abhorred. For Heidegger, the state means inequality based on a collective understanding of Being. The state is a mode of existence where there are leaders and followers in a hierarchical rank, where there are masters and slaves. A revelation and understanding of Being has to be wrested in a historical struggle, a task not equally easy for everyone. Consequently, gathering an understanding of Being is not a democratic enterprise. The state-as-rank is ordered so that the strongest are on top. They are the ones that have revealed, gathered and established the centre of the state. They are the ones bearing the heavy load of divine intervention, building the temples for the gods and thereby providing a reason or gathering (logos) for Being for the people. The only qualification we should add to this blatant Heideggerian elitism is that for him the “strongest” is not defined physically, not, indeed, in any biological way, as, for instance, some kind of “survivability”. Strength is displayed in the struggle for a meaning-gathering centre facing nothingness, anxiety and death. The Heideggerian strength is the strength of a Heraclitus, a Hölderlin or a Hitler and the strength of a worker in the midst of elementary powers. This strength is not a psychological play of emotions, but rather openness to the severity and greatness of essential anxiety. As is to be expected, the fact that Heidegger himself was an academic person who never had his baptism of fire on the front has raised suspicions that his militaristic tone is a product of intoxication by the National Socialist rhetoric of hardness, clarity and struggle. According to the suspicion, as an unmilitary person himself, Heidegger overcompensates by imitating and valorising a military language.28 There may be some psychological truth to such suspicions, but it must be noted that Heidegger was neither here nor anywhere else an opportunist. The themes of struggle and endurance in the face of nothingness are present before the 1930’s and after the war. On the other hand, the themes of rank, leadership and followership are sufficiently vague so that Heidegger can after the war claim that he meant by them (like by his talk about the greatness and truth of National Socialism) spiritual things and not the crass biological and physical notions of “blonde beasts” in typical National Socialist propaganda. Two things should be noted about this defence by Heidegger. First, his claim is true. All the time he was talking of spiritual matters (anxiety, resoluteness, logos as the centre of the polis) rather than of biological matters (pure progeny through eugenics or selection). When speaking of rank, Heidegger does not mean that tall, blond, 37

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muscular SS-men selected for Aryan breeding should be on top. Rather, for him rank genuinely places the true masters of a Greek-German revelation of historical essence at the highest places of leadership. In this sense Heidegger is anti-opportunistic and is telling the truth. Consequently, many interpreters have heaved a sigh of relief, because they imagine that the fact that Heidegger was oriented spiritually and not biologically exonerates him of all Nazism. The relief might be justified if Nazism would have been only anti-spiritual or exclusively biological, which is not the case. In any case, for the second: at the same time the defence is still an evasion, because Heidegger does not in the same breath remind us that he would have much preferred a Nazi victory in the war even in the case where it would have meant the victory of Aryan SS-men. Heidegger is careful in leaving a grey area where spiritual greatness and physical ruthlessness coincide. This is something he never openly discusses. However, the greyness of the area of overlap is as such an indication of honesty, since in the 1930’s the two genuinely did mix. To be sure, Hitler himself was not a particularly athletic or stereotypically Aryan person. Like Heidegger, he was small and dark. Heidegger was politically first and foremost a Hitlerist: he believed that Hitler had revealed a new historical destiny for Germans. Thus he could in a completely non-opportunistic way and without quotation marks say that “The Führer himself and alone is the present-day and future German reality and its law”.29 The military is one side of this German Dasein, and Hitler himself and the Hitlerists believed in Hitler’s unprecedented military genius. But also for Hitler himself, the military is only one side of the whole, and in Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede we find also the work and knowledge services. “NUR NOCH DIE JUGEND KANN UNS RETTEN”30

The idea of work service must be attended to carefully because the notion of the worker is so sensitive and central for Heidegger. The structural reforms that Heidegger mainly works with in the Nazi revolution are two, both connected to higher education: first, the realisation of the Führerprinzip in German universities (as a part of the Gleichshaltung, or the introduction of Nazi principles in all levels and forms of German society) and, second, the Wissenschaftslager or “knowledge camp”.31 We saw already while discussing the state, how important leadership is for Heidegger. The most important goal of the rectorship for Heidegger is the replacement of liberal “academic freedom” by leadership and followership in the University of Freiburg. Freiburg is to be the example that other universities can follow. However, the Führerprinzip comes mainly from the Nazi party and Heidegger acts as one of the implementers. He gives a philosophical interpretation of the principle and as a practical revolutionary enacts the principle in his place of work. In contrast to this, the Wissenschaftslager is largely Heidegger’s own innovation and a matter of the heart. It is his way of realising the ideals of the worker in the revolution. His field of operations is naturally the university, and therefore the goal is a student and a teacher as a worker. In a speech in November 1933, Heidegger describes the newly awakened National Socialist students, their clear eyes and firm hands and continues: 38

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This kind of student does not ‘study’ anymore, i.e., he does not sit somewhere hidden, in order to from there to ‘strive’ somewhere. This new kind of knowledge-willing student is always on the move. This student becomes a worker.32 The new worker-student does not separate between studying and other activities (in other words, does not separate between knowledge and action). The student is always a part of the people and saturated by the work for the people. This work, in turn, is the basis of the National Socialist state: Work moves and connects the people into the force field of all elementary powers of Being. The fabric of national Dasein that is formed in work and as work is the state. The National Socialist state is a worker-state.33 A great many of the pieces come together in the notion of the Arbeiterstaat: rank, leadership, the state as the highest mode of existence, polis with its radiant logoscentre, work as endurance among elementary powers. Put in another way, it is the importance of work that makes Heidegger a National Socialist, simply because for him genuine work is national (rooted in the national, völkisch, soil and made meaningful by the national understanding of Being) and socialist (done for the collective interest, not for individual gain). As Christopher Rickey (2002, 178) notes, for Heidegger work is national (in contrast to the internationalism of communism) and socialist (not capitalist). Here we see the goal shared by Heidegger and Marx: a type of work that overcomes modern alienation. Also the practical steps taken towards the ideal are partially similar. For instance, the Heideggerian Wissenschaftslager shares elements with the voluntary and collective physical work propagated by Che Guevara after the Cuban revolution.34 The first knowledge camp was organised by Heidegger in October 1933 at Todtnauberg. The idea was to gather together students and staff for physical work and thought. The camp begun with a march from the University to the campsite. The distance is well over 20 kilometres. Heidegger emphasised the role of the march and asked that participants wear either the SA or the SS uniform (Faye 2009, 65).35 In his letters after the camp Heidegger takes up the hard lessons of the camp, mentioning especially that he had to send some of the participants back home because they were not suitable for the camp (Faye 2009, 65-66).36 It is obvious that one reason for Heidegger to start the camps to begin with was precisely to overcome the attachment to individual idiosyncrasies and cravings for convenience and to replace them with discipline, sacrifice and service as organised by the leaders-followers structure.37 In a letter sent beforehand to the participants, Heidegger sets three goals for the camp. First, to create awareness of the current situation of the universities, second, to reflect on the National Socialist goals with regard to higher education and, third, the building of a Kameradschaftshaus to house both students and staff and to propel the co-operation between student and teacher organisations (Ott 1993, 229). Furthermore, Heidegger tells that the camp shall not be conducted in the frame of 39

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an empty and formal schedule, but through an authentic leader-follower structure. The camp can succeed only on the basis of courage, leading to loyalty, sacrifice and service (Ott 1993, 229). Here we see one of the most collectivist and concrete manifestations of Heidegger’s insight that liberalist individual persons and subjects may well happen to exist (as nearly inevitable products of the contemporary technological life-styles), but that the greatness of Dasein is defined by how authentically and courageously the Dasein is able to work despite the individuals and subjects. The avoidance or disregard to the subject can be learned and exercised, even though the risks and dangers in such learning are great, as one is all the time working against the mainstream. The avoidance of the subject is a topic evident in Heidegger in all of his phases. The differentia specifica that the Wissenschaftslager brings to the topic is the dissolution of the subject through hardness and clarity, through leadership and discipline. Here we are very close to Jüngerian ideas of the worker-soldier hardened by ruthless war. It is easy to see how Heidegger may have seen in the revolution an opening to give his own stamp to this Jüngerian current by creating inside the university a new practice that unites work and science in a way that overcomes individualism. The time was right and the signs favourable: physical work, the connection to land, worker as a non-individual Gestalt, the rooting of the sciences in national soil. The camps were some of the greatest and hardest moments of Heidegger’s life. No wonder then, that he continued with the camps even after having resigned the rectorship when his version of the Führerprinzip had proven to be too radical. At the same time, the Wissenschaftslager was an innovative expansion of the Nazi Arbeitslager, where the point was to eradicate the barriers between physical and mental labour and between social classes. Heidegger wanted to take the idea further by giving the mental labourers of the university a chance to be invigorated and rooted by physical work. The goals of the Wissenschaftslager and the Arbeitslager were the same: to make work into a unifying experience that spans over the whole human existence in a state. In a sense, this included an attack on modern division of labour. Everyone has to take part in physical labour and only thought immersed in physical labour is worth its name. Even though Heidegger does not discuss division of labour as such,38 he sees alienation from physical work and the dismissal of handicrafts and agricultural work as signs of degeneration. Here he presents an easy target to critics who see in National Socialism an attempt to cover up class contradictions by presenting an illusory national unity: There is only one German ‘state of life’. It is the status of the worker, freely rooted in the carrying ground of the people and in the historical will of the state. The character of the status of the worker will be formed in the movement of the German National Socialist Workers Party.39 There is only one living standard and one social class: the workers led by the party and rooted in the Volk. Naturally, rightly understood and rightly led the university has an important role here, and the National Socialist revolution gives Heidegger 40

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the possibility of reorganising the sclerotic and overly liberal structure of higher education. Self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung)40 is according to Heidegger the highest goal of existence and in the university self-assertion has three parts. However, those three are integral parts of a whole, the self-assertion by worker-students and worker-teachers. The goal is to unify and to gather together, not to instantiate new bureaucratic categories. Work service in the university implies being rooted into the tasks that the common people meets in its everyday struggles.41 From the perspective of the university, the goal is to embed scientific study in physical work and to instil physical work with the existential questions of the people. Is there a contradiction between the anti-hierarchical workerism and rank-giving Führerprinzip? Not really. A contradiction arises if we think that the National Socialist state is the paradigm of an overly bureaucratic and extremely stratified hierarchy. To be sure, National Socialist Germany displayed some of these features, more and more over time. But the point of the Führerprinzip is to cut through bureaucracy and hierarchies and to implement decisions on the basis of content and expertise saturated by the correct kind of will. The leader knows where the collective is going and with his (sic) charismatic example pushes his will through despite all bureaucratic and petrified structures. The leadership-by-example included in Heidegger’s thinking on rank is his philosophical version of the Führerprinzip. Famously, Führer-rector Heidegger realised reforms that got rid of hierarchies and gave the students a role in the university government (Ott 1993, Faye 2009, Krell 1992, 145ff). As a revolutionary, Heidegger did not make the mistake that Žižek sees as the cardinal sin: to pose as a revolutionary but to leave the old bourgeois structures standing. On the contrary, Heidegger was so eager for structural reforms that he ran ahead of the official National Socialist policy. His power base were local students and the National Socialist student organisations (Krell 1992, 146, Safranski 1999, 258). Heidegger did not rely on the university mandarins or the powerful in the city of Freiburg, not to speak of the economic elite. He was one with the radical students. Only the young can save us—Heidegger sees himself as a part of a youthful radicalism that overthrows all old forms.42 This is also a part of the generational experience of the World War I veterans that Heidegger shares, among others, with Hitler and Jünger. The veterans felt that the old world had stabbed them in the back. Therefore the old world had to be destroyed in favour of a new humanity that could properly be lived and experienced only by the young. When the National Socialist party and its state machinery slowly found ways of living together with the existing structures of the scientific world (and the religious world and so on), it was time for radicals like Heidegger to be disappointed (Faye 2009, Milchman & Rosenberg 1997, 93). Heidegger stepped down from the rectorship in 1934 because his reforms were too radical for both the university and the National Socialist policymakers. Especially with regard to the Führerprinzip Heidegger would have liked to move faster than was expedient. When Realpolitik thus failed to give a working space for Heidegger, he sought new ways of influencing the political future of Germany. As a revolutionary, Heidegger was more Žižekian 41

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than the National Socialist party! In Freiburg and, eventually, in German higher education he lost to the establishment (and to the specialisation of scientific disciplines, to professionalisation) also because the National Socialist revolution left its goals unfinished.43 Again Heidegger is honest in his post-war statements: the National Socialist party and especially its technocratic wing betrayed the movement and him, not the other way around. According to the Führerprinzip, the leader does not espouse tyrannical decrees by whim. He embodies the will of the people. Like Heidegger writes, true camaraderie is born out of following a leader, not vice versa (GA16, 204). Camaraderie, in turn, is a form of endurance and sacrifice that gives ground to an active community, or, in Žižek’s words, a collective. Žižek (2007a, 29) never tires of repeating that discipline and collectivity are not, as such, National Socialist or Fascist. They are useful and revolutionary forms that the National Socialists and Fascists borrowed from the Marxist workers movement. Heidegger provides an interesting explanation for the revolutionary implications of discipline and collectivity while discussing the camaraderie created through following a leader: Camaraderie will transform the individual and set in him the character of a totally unique kind of youth. […] The solitary individual as well as the mass lacking discipline and direction will be shattered by the force of these young people.44 This is a brilliant crystallisation of the Žižekian-Heideggerian account of revolutionary collectivity: both an individual fanatic and a goalless mass are paper tigers in front of a collective born through leadership and refined through camaraderie! While Žižek often flirts with Stalinism—even though he quickly pulls back and says that Stalinism destroyed the revolution, committed heinous crimes and that future communism must learn from the mistakes of Stalinism—we have to ask if he agrees with Heidegger in that camaraderie is born only out of leadership? Sometimes Žižek writes in this vein, sounding exactly like the Heidegger of the 1930’s: The paradox to accept is that in democracy, individuals do tend to remain stuck on the level of ‘servicing goods’—often, one does need a Leader in order to ‘do the impossible’. The authentic Leader is literally the One who enables me actually to choose myself—my subordination to him is the highest act of freedom. (2002a, 247) Is this kind of camaraderie and sacrifice “hardened through leadership” also a condition for communist (or Lacanian) collectivity? The question of collectivity leads directly to the question of the state formed by the collective. The collective and the state are things that figure both in Žižek’s and Heidegger’s revolutions. The decisive difference is that for Heidegger the collective is the people as a historic and linguistic-cultural unit, as rooted originality, gathered by the shining example in the centre of the polis, while for Žižek the collective is formed by “Christian” subjects that have—in the words of Luke and Paul—cut all ties to their historic and linguistic roots and are therefore universal. 42

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In contrast to many forms of contemporary leftism, Žižek’s political philosophy is characterised by his old-fashioned belief that the purpose of a revolution is to capture the power structure of the state. He is dismissive of, for instance, the Zapatist model where a new world is built outside the state or in the interstices of the state.45 In his turn, Heidegger is a state philosopher of the most devoted kind. He does not only claim that the state in one mode of human existence (which as such would not be very controversial, even an anarchist anthropologist like Pierre Clastres might agree46) or that the state is an order of rank, but that the state is the highest form of human existence: The state is the most real reality, which must give to all of Being a new meaning in a new, original way. The highest realisation of human existence happens in a state.47 This is a stark claim. It is hard to imagine higher praise for statehood.48 If in a Greek sense a human is a political animal, then the fullest realisation of human possibilities is a political matter and happens in a state. Žižek agrees on the fundamentally political nature of human being and on the collectivity of its highest achievements, but as a communist he should view hierarchical rank and the state at most as preliminary steps along the way towards a stateless and non-hierarchical society. It is no surprise, then, that during the 1930’s Heidegger takes up Hegel. The notion that the state is the highest realisation of human freedom is historically most clearly associated with Hegel. Whether Hegel himself thought so or not, the Prussian bourgeois state has been thought to represent the pinnacle of this Hegelian development. Together with other left Hegelians, Marx turns the Prussian state into the starting point towards communism. Heidegger joins the fray by claiming in his winter seminar 1934-35: “It has been said that Hegel died in 1933. On the contrary, he has just begun to live”49. So Heidegger agrees with the left or young Hegelians! Only the overthrow of the bourgeois state gives room for real freedom. The National Socialist revolution was generally seen as the final nail in Hegel’s coffin, since the revolution ended the Prussian state form and the Weimar republic. But Heidegger does not believe the news of the demise, simply because he wants to read Hegel’s notion of freedom in terms of the National Socialist state. In a consistent way Heidegger presents Hegel as the perfection of Western thought on the state. If this is the case, if Hegel’s though of the state presents the most advanced stage (Vollendung) of political philosophy and if the National Socialist state as unified by work is the rebirth of Western culture and especially of the Greek-German humanity against the Asiatic and against Americanism, it is necessary to see in the National Socialist state the implementation of the Hegelian ideals. To think together freedom and the National Socialist state may be difficult, if freedom is conceptualised in terms of individual liberty and the Nazi state is seen as quintessentially totalitarian. But these were not Heidegger’s views on Hegel or the Nazi state, quite the opposite (cited in Faye 2009, 225):

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We can not understand Hegel’s idea of freedom, if we take it to be an essential feature of an individual ego. […] Freedom is real only when there is a community of egos, subjects.50 By definition, freedom is not a matter of individuals or separate selves. Authentic freedom is possible only when there exist a number of humans that collectively reveal Being and form a shared, lived and committed understanding of Being. The freedom that Hegel and the National Socialists talk about is not individual liberty, not the freedom of choice, not freely-floating consciousness (freischewenbende Bewußtsein), but a collective, historical and essential self-assertion. Here one is unavoidably reminded of Isaiah Berlin’s (1990) classic distinction between negative and positive liberty, where negative liberty means the absence of things stopping one from doing what one wants and positive freedom means the ability to actually realise one’s inherent potential. From the liberal perspective, negative freedom is freedom tout court, and the notion of positive freedom sounds suspect because the notion is based on an idea of a “self” or “humanity” or in any case a set of unrealised potentials that can be defined. Then, the suspicion continues, in order to create the possibilities for the realisation of those potentialities, the circumstances in the world are changed so that people are in a sense “forced” to be free, to realise their true potential. According to these definitions, Heidegger’s notion of freedom is of the positive kind, because it is, in principle, possible only after the absence of the individual or at least during moments when the individual is not prominent. The Hegelian ideal state and freedom that Heidegger talks about are not possible if all that exists in the world are negatively free individuals. Freedom and the state are non-individual, collective. This is also the notion of freedom that Heidegger has in mind when he is talking about the university and academic freedom. The academic freedom to be destroyed is Berlin’s negative freedom, while the new kind of freedom can be found through the threefold task that takes part in constructing a national worker’s collective. In a similar way, Žižek is working for positive freedom, even though he conceptualises the difference in terms of “formal freedom” (freedom taking place in the framework of the existing symbolic universe) and actual freedom (freedom to change the co-ordinates of the prevailing symbolic order). For Žižek, revolution means the realisation of actual freedom and thus the opening up of a previously non-existent field of action. In May 1934 Heidegger writes that the National Socialist revolution is precisely a matter of freedom: The new movement that goes through this people is the deepest and widest care about the freedom of the people. For us, freedom does not mean the absence of restrictions in doing and letting be, but rather: commitment to the inner law and order of our essence […] This is the authentic meaning of German socialism. It doesn’t mean the mere change of economic views, it doesn’t mean dull levelling down; it does not imply the haphazard management of a goalless common good.51 44

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Three denials: the National Socialist movement is not about restructuring the economic sphere, not about a levelling, not about welfare, but rather about setting struggle as inner law, which is the highest form of freedom. Heidegger continues: German socialism is the battle for the measures and laws of the essential order for our people; German socialism wants rank according to inner test and achievement, it wants the unconditionality of service and the inviolable honour of all work. This is what freedom of the people means to us.52 In the same speech Heidegger explains also what he means by spirituality and by rank: We must spiritually conquer the Great War, i.e., battle becomes the innermost law of our Dasein.53 He has just reminded the listeners of the comrades that fell in the Great War—not so that one would be calling the dead for help, but rather so that the dead comrades demand from the living that the historical meaning of the Great War be unfolded as the future of Germany (GA16, 282-283). The spiritual message of the Great War is, in other words, simply the demand to establish struggle as inner law. This is the generational experience that Heidegger gained from the war and this is what he means when talking of spirit and spirituality: to set an inner law for experience and life. Struggle as inner law gives a two-pronged gift. First, an order of rank and, second, freedom. In his speech Heidegger enlists again Heraclitus’ fragment 53 (“Polemos is the father of all things, letting one appear as king and the other as slave”) to support his view that struggle gives measure and order. Clearly, according to Heraclitus, polemos sets an order of rank and gives a measure for human life. This is the core of Heidegger’s revolutionary thought: to set as inner law the battle (against the Asiatic, against the double pincers of Americanism and Bolshevism) that gives us a new form of freedom and (re-)establishes a spiritual Greek-German-European measure and rank. What could this positive Hegelian or Heideggerian freedom mean in practice? Again, Heidegger is fairly precise. Freedom, in practice, means work as unconditional and sacrificial service inspired by battle as inner law. What battle? The battle against the Asiatic, the battle for the inner truth and greatness of the German people, the battle for the historical meaning of World War I. An inner battle that also takes visible form in the disciplined following of a leader, in the collective organisation through organic rank, in the dissolution of the individual in national experience. These answers are precise because they are open. The point is not a battle that shows that Germany is great, but a battle in which Germany becomes great, or then not; a battle that shows that Europe is capable of rebirth, or then not. In his speech Heidegger is not blind towards the need to renew social and economic structures. Quite the contrary: But the liberation to this freedom requires the full unravelling of the fabric of the people—its groups, occupations, sects, and each individual.54 45

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Once again Heidegger is straightforward and precise. The freedom promised by the revolution is possible only if the social structures that precede the revolution are utterly erased. He focuses especially on two things to be dismantled. First, the bourgeois worldview that clings to the temporary and the half-baked and does not recognise greatness and uniqueness. Second, the illusory world born after World War I, full of muddled humanism, empty patriotism and loose Christianity. These two— the bourgeois world and the levelling of values—have to be burnt to the ground (ausgebrannt). In their place, we will have measure, rank and the freedom through battle as inner law. To be sure, it is striking that here, too, Heidegger talks about the change of values and practices, of inner law and “change in attitudes”, not, for instance, of ownership of the means of production or of class relationships. But he himself would point out that only the change of the inner law is essential because it changes the whole life, while external measures can get only half-way. The revolution has to happen for the right reasons and the right form—say, the restructuring of economic matters—is not enough. An inner revolution is also directly visible in action, not as the slavish adherence to external, formal rules, but as the creative unfolding of a new life. What is the difference between following formal rules and doing the right thing because of an inner law? The difference may be hard if not impossible to define clearly, if not else then because a clear conceptual definition would be biased towards formal rule-following. Again we are dealing with a genuine, open and creative struggle. If overcoming one’s bourgeois self would be a matter of following a clear program (“Take these seven easy steps to overcome your inner capitalist!”) the overcoming itself would be bourgeois. It is here that we need sensitivity towards the unique. Again, Heidegger sees the high-strung and abstract as one with the concrete and everyday. The bourgeois life is based on choosing this or that, on identity politics, on consumer choices. However, when the understanding of Being is changed, when the bourgeois self is dissolved or dethroned, life as whole changes, not because of consumer choices or because of lifestyle changes, but because of an overarching inner, spiritual battle. That is why Heidegger does not see the revolution as a matter of rules and obligations but as a matter of essentially human Hegelian freedom. In the 1930’s, Heidegger was sure that a revolution was needed for freedom to be possible at all. Otherwise the situation was continuously developing in the wrong direction, towards liberalism and individualism. Afterwards we have seen an even more powerful half-century of individualist and consumerist propaganda, so it should be no surprise if our ability to imagine other types of freedom has withered. After the war Heidegger was not optimistic about the future, but the 1933 revolution was for him a historical possibility to overcome individualism and struggle for freedom in an Arbeiterstaat. Besides the 1933 revolution, he does not discuss other examples of historical moments where individualism and liberalism could be overcome (with the possible exception of classical Greece). Žižek may present examples that are less revolutionary, such as the egalitarian possibilities of the welfare state or the best moments of workers collectives in the German Democratic Republic. However, for 46

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Žižek, too, the fullest moment of actual freedom is the moment of revolution, where people function as if one unified collective subject, overcoming their “pathological” individual preferences and thereby creating a new sphere of liberty beyond what was previously thought possible. So how do universalism and revolutions fare together? Let us take as an example the French revolution of 1789 where the ideals of liberty, brotherhood and equality are suddenly taken seriously, as starting points of all practices, which as such changes the structures of the state and many social “facts”. The example is, of course, not neutral with regard to Heidegger’s theory of the people or the state, since the ideals of 1789 as universal change political landscapes and facts far beyond the borders of France. Even though the counter-revolution quickly reverses several of the advances and even succeeds in rolling many things back to a worse state than before the revolution, Žižek sees in it a persistent symbolic aspect. The 1789 revolution opens up a new form in the symbolic universe, a space of liberty, brotherhood and equality that can be re-realised better than the original failure in 1789. Second, Žižek would emphasise the non-nationality of true liberty and revolution. For example, the greatest manifestation of the 1789 revolution was the slave uprising in Haiti that understood the ideals even more literally than the French, taking them to mean the liberation of slaves and abolition of racial thinking, thus welcoming the repressing French troops by singing the Marseillaise (Buck-Morss 2000). In the Haitian revolution, the new space created through actual freedom in a revolution and the universality of the revolution are seamlessly integrated. However, it would not be too hard for Heidegger to reply that despite their direct historical connection, the French and Haitian revolutions are very different and also have very different consequences (the French revolution is still being celebrated, whereas Haiti seems to be thrown into a permanent hell for the audaciousness of taking the universality of the ideals seriously) and that the different fates are dependent on historical-culturalvölkisch circumstances (mainly, the near ineradicable Western colonialism and imperialism). Furthermore, Heidegger might continue, even if the “same” universal revolution would have taken place both in France and in Haiti, it would be a case of the typical liberal-Western unification, rather than a case of creating real freedom in an Arbeiterstaat. And how should we assess the situation? Is it not the case that a kind of universal revolution has taken place both in France and Haiti, namely the creeping revolution of global capitalism and a technological understanding of the world, a revolution systematically benefiting a relatively bigger portion of the French and oppressing a relatively bigger portion of the Haitians? What was the relationship between the 1933 revolution and freedom? Žižek would claim that the National Socialist revolution was a fraud. The revolution did not fundamentally alter the economic and productive structures of the bourgeois era. The people were drawn into the pseudo-excitement of a pseudo-revolution; the capitalists through guaranteed safety and order, the workers through economic improvements and everybody by giving a dream of a German Grossraum. Furthermore, everyone enjoyed the release from the humiliating peace of Versailles and the economic 47

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austerity of the final Weimar years. It is true that there are significant parallels between the opportunistic-economic Germany of the 1930’s and the China of the 1990’s and 2000’s. Both Communistic China and National Socialist Germany have achieved a decade-long economic growth in the double digits by combining a state-guaranteed order and capitalist freedom: order and long working days for the workers, freedom and carrots for investments for the capitalists.55 This is certainly a part of the truth and also a part of the rising new authoritarian capitalism that now, in the 2010’s, combines a neoliberal capitalist economy and a pseudo-democratic state (or, in other words, divorces democracy from capitalism). But is it really credible that the revolutionary fervour experienced by the Germans in the 1930’s was all artificial and fake? Is not the whole theory of the “mass psychology of Fascism”—according to which the tens of thousands of people cheering to Hitler’s motorcades or taking part in the massive National Socialist party rallies were overtaken by a kind of illusion, a phantasma with an irrational grip—a kind of ruse, an attempt to stop thinking? Of course there is something true in the theory of mass psychology of Fascism and in the theories that emphasise the aesthetic appeal of fascism. But what if the revolution in Germany in the 1930’s also included real experiences of renewal, freedom, creativity? What if the numerous contemporary witnesses who, like Heidegger, speak of the birth of a new type of humanity, of the awakening of rejuvenating forces, of a jubilant and glorious collective enterprise, are partially right? For instance, in roughly the same amount that the witnesses to the 1789 revolution are right in emphasising those experiences? And did not the National Socialist revolution inspire revolutionary feelings outside Germany in Europe? Did not some people in France, the Balkans, Scandinavia, and so on welcome with joy the rise of a New Europe in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany? The export of the National Socialist revolution outside Germany—philosophically speaking, the potentially universal nature of the revolution—was a thorny question for the National Socialists themselves. By definition, National Socialism can be seen as “National Socialism in one country”. Consequently, the support that the Nazi party gave to its brother organisations in Europe was even during the war very haphazard, intermittent and ineffectual. But the party did contain an “international” or at least “supra-national” wing that believed that all peoples should experience their own national awakening and, as a consequence, a national revolution. To be sure, incipient non-German national revolutionary movements with charismatic leaders did turn up, along with a longer list of traitors, puppet-regimes and quislings.56 In any case, we do not gain in understanding Nazism if we imagine it as purely staged populism without an engaged and committed revolutionary base. The totalitarian machine of the Nazi state was in full operation only during the war (and during the war, most effectively after 1940), and at no point was it fully directed against ordinary Germans. Only hegemonic competitors, like the communists and rival Nazi wings, as well as unwanted groups like gays bore the brunt of totalitarian oppression right from the beginning.57 48

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The fact is that a great part of Germans and a significant amount of other Europeans were excited about the rise of National Socialism and experienced 1933 as an historical opening to which it was invigorating and honourable to take part. One might even present a rule of thumb, based on a criterion that Georges Bataille develops in his philosophical anthropology. Bataille says that all theories of human existence that make the genocide of the Jews inexplicable or impossible (for instance, by claiming that no ordinary person would ever take part in anything like it) have to be dismissed for that reason. According to Bataille, a proper philosophical anthropology has to show man as capable of genocide, simply because he is capable of it, as history unfortunately has shown (Surya 2002, 360-362). A similar rule of thumb could be presented with regard to the National Socialist revolution: any proper account of the 1933 revolution has to present it as a revolution, not as essentially something else. In the 1933 revolution many people acted over and above their individual interests thereby creating a new area of collective freedom. In this way, they acted without a subject (Heidegger) but not necessarily as universal subjects (Žižek), since the subjectlessness was limited to Germanness, Aryanness or to a particular type of Europeanness. From the Žižekian point of view, the 1933 revolution falls short, because its subject was limited by a particular substance and was not, therefore, the universal subject distinguished from all particularities. From Heidegger’s point of view, on the contrary, the revolution was true because, for the first, there is no empty form of universal subjectivity as distinct from all real life (or, if we insist on such empty universal form, we only succeed in producing a perverted version of some particularity, because of the circularity inside the metaphysics of subjectivity), and, second, because the greatness of human being can be reached only through rooted existence. Here we encounter a surprising clumsiness in Žižek’s otherwise smooth account (e.g., in 2007a, 2002a, 117-132, 2002b, 189-193). Žižek must deny that the 1933 revolution was, indeed, a revolution, because for him a revolution is by definition something done by the universal subject. However, denying that 1933 was a revolution is hard in the light of the historical evidence. The same goes for the distinction between the 1918 revolution and the 1933 pseudo-revolution. Žižek must produce an absolute distinction between the two and between the totalitarian crimes that follow from them, Stalinism and Hitlerism. In other words, Žižek’s task is the reverse of what Hannah Arendt does in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958) where the point is to analyse the common strains in Nazism and Soviet rule. There are several symptomatic claims connected to this attempt. Žižek’s contention that there are, as yet, no good theories of Stalinism (in contrast to Nazi terror, of which Žižek, by implication, seems to think there are satisfactory explanations) is philosophically intriguing. Connected to this, Žižek makes the admirable demand that leftist thinkers have to criticise Stalinism better than the detractors of socialism and communism. Furthermore, Žižek claims that it is possible to be nostalgic about the October revolution (like the phenomenon of ostalgia proves), whereas any 49

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nostalgia towards the 1933 revolution is impossible.58 The claim is simply untrue. Nazi-nostalgia exists, and the market for Nazi memorabilia easily rivals that for ostalgia. One crucial distinction that Žižek points out is that the Nazi terror was directed towards specific groups of people (Jews, Roma, communists, gays) whereas Stalin’s terror was without specific direction: it was a kind of autoimmune failure of the society, where anyone from any group could become the victim. This is true. Anyone could be the target in Stalin’s purges. The terror was to a great degree without target or direction. However, unfortunately, this is not the whole story. Stalin’s terror was also directed. For instance, ethnic minorities were targeted disproportionally. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, it was much more dangerous to be a Finnish or Jewish communist than a Russian communist. Furthermore, several ethnic groups were murdered or displaced as such, i.e., as ethnic groups, with no regard to party membership. Consequently, it has been argued that Stalin’s terror should be classified as genocide (or, more precisely, as a series of genocides59). To put it in Žižekian terms, the universal form of Stalinist terror (the autoimmune reaction to the impasse of social revolution) was contaminated by a pathological content (suspicion towards ethnic minorities, such as Jews, Finns, etc.). But here we are stuck in the circle of subjectivity: the universal form of Stalinist terror can be recognised amidst the pathological content only if we have already presupposed the universal subject of the October revolution. An alien transported from Mars to Earth during the 1930’s would have a much harder time in distilling the difference between the universal form and the particular content. Likewise, in Nazi terror there were untargeted forms. For instance, along the Eastern front, the murdering repeatedly got out of control and did not conform to the ideal of “racial purification”, as groups embittered under Soviet rule unleashed their aggressions against other groups (sometimes identified ethnically, sometimes culturally, sometimes economico-politically, often in a mix of all the criteria) right after having been “liberated” by the Wehrmacht. In addition, it has often been noted how these Eastern mass-murders in an irrational way stood in the way of the German war campaign (see, e.g., Mazover 2009, Tooze 2006). Moreover, like Stalinism, Nazi terror also had some “autoimmune” characteristics, like, for instance, the purge of the SA wing. Was not the National Socialist terror, in fact, exceedingly irrational as it was one contributing factor in Germany’s defeat? Speer’s armament ministry and other officials responsible for warfare often had to step in and put brakes on Himmler’s and his acolytes’ eagerness to murder Jews and other non-Aryans capable of work. And did not Stalin’s terror contain a core of rationality, because it was able to keep Stalin and his cohort in power in the midst of the forced leap from feudalism to modern industrialism? Maybe the definition of the criteria for a genuine revolution is the weakest link in Žižek’s quest for the absolute distinction. According to Žižek, a true revolution is not done for the eyes of the Big Other, but rather in a state of genuine uncertainty, without guarantees. The revolution is made for its own sake and it retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. And therein is the rub: for Heidegger and 50

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many other National Socialists, the 1933 revolution is precisely a matter of German self-assertion without any guarantees, scientific proofs or religious authorities. It is a matter of willing oneself, as German Dasein. Or, the other way around, if we want to claim that there were, indeed, Big Others guaranteeing the 1933 revolution, such as the Aryan race or the historical destiny of Germany, there is a bit of truth in it. Revolutions are big things, big enough to contain many different motivations and viewpoints.60 And the same goes for the October revolution. It was also partially guaranteed by several Big Others, like the socialist human being, supposedly deterministic historical development or the brotherhood between all humans. The revolution in 1933 had economic reasons and motivations, and the October revolution had spiritual reasons and motivations. The matters are mixed, and Žižek’s description of a revolution without a Big Other fits surprisingly well with the 1933 revolution, making his absolute distinction less convincing. Moreover, on the theoretical level and in his concepts Žižek is maybe unawares close to the claim that the 1933 revolution was, indeed, a revolution. Like noted above, Žižek claims that even though both the October revolution and the 1933 revolution were followed by regimes of terror and murder on a massive scale, the October revolution is saved by the fact that it—unlike the 1933 revolution—has a form that can be separated from the failure in the real world and, therefore, repeated. But Žižek also claims that there is nothing wrong in many of the forms of the National Socialist revolution—such as collective discipline, sacrifice, mass rallies, and so on. The mistake lies in the concrete “twist” given to these forms in the Nazi revolution. In other words, as forms collective discipline, readiness for sacrifice, resoluteness and so on are fine by Žižek, as long as the concrete twists given to them are right… Does not this mean that there was, after all, something formally right in the Nazi revolution? These details do not, of course, eliminate the distinction that Žižek describes. There are real and important differences between the Nazi and the Soviet revolutions. In Germany, an ethnic German that kept to him- or herself was most of the time quite safe from Nazi terror and an ethnic Jew absolutely in danger, whereas in Stalin’s Soviet Union no ethnicity guaranteed safety and no ethnicity meant absolute danger. But the relative overlaps—the irrationality of Nazi terror and rationality of Stalinist terror—show that Žižek distinction—which needs to be absolute—relies more on high-handed theory than on a detailed analysis of the phenomena. Žižek’s theory of revolution works well in theory but much worse in practice. The concept needed for the theory to work without a hitch is familiar—the concept of the minimalistic subject. One is tempted to apply Heidegger on Žižek’s theory. In addition to the temporality and historicity of Being, a second major lesson Heidegger has taught all philosophers (largely with the help of Foucault) is that one should always ask what concrete work does a concept do, what are its practical effects. So, what concrete work do the concepts of the minimalistic subject and of revolution do in Žižek? What do they bring about? 51

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On the level of theory, the minimalistic subject makes it possible to distinguish those revolutions and revolutionary acts in which the subject creates a new space in the symbolic order. A true revolutionary act was impossible before it was done. In this way, the revolution causes a reversal in time or a flipped causal relationship, because the act retroactively inserts its own causes in the past. After the fact, the revolution is perceived as having always already been possible, even necessary, but not beforehand. In terms of the symbolic universe, the revolutionary act creates a new empty space in the symbolic, capable of different kinds of concrete content. The concrete substance may fail and lead to horrors, but in addition to the failed substance the revolutionary act has created a new form (the empty space in the symbolic) that can be recognised and filled anew. At the same time, the whole existence of the symbolic universe is dependent on the existence of the subject. The minimalistic subject, the revolutionary act and the symbolic universe in Žižek all perform roughly the same task. The task is to avoid Heidegger’s mistake, the mistake of ending up with a national, rooted, particularistic, non-universal revolution. The task is performed by recognising a universal revolution in the symbolic universe; a revolution done by the subject that cuts itself from all particular substance. HEIDEGGER’S STEP AND ITS DIRECTION

There are four closely linked characteristics in Heidegger’s revolution: human being as collective and national, freedom, rank based on leadership and philosophy as a völkisch-revolutionary enterprise. The first and in some sense the most general is the question of human existence. For Heidegger, humans are first and foremost and at their best non-individual and non-subjective. The point of the term “Dasein” is to convey that human existence is collective, something shared, and not only with other humans: Dasein includes elements that are traditionally though to be non-human. To be human is to be part of a generation, a people, a history. At best, an individual is an example of her or his generation, like the breaking crest of a wave that is part of a much larger water-mass going up and down. There are, to be sure, subjects that engage in supposedly universal enterprises like mathematics or the easily translatable endeavours of technology and trade, but all these things are phenomenal foam on the shared and historical understanding of Being. Closest to the process where Being is uncovered and understood are the workers connected to elementary forces—workers and workerpoets, worker-thinkers and worker-politicians. They do not in any straightforward causal way bring about the uncovering of Being, but in some way they help it to happen. Life close to the elementary forces includes non-human participants, demigods and demons, to deinon. This basic rock of human existence is not a gentle and caring Mother Earth. Rather, its is shot through with the uncanny and terrorising rumble of a fundamental struggle in Being itself. Being as a people is in Heidegger’s philosophy best realised in the way paved by the Classic Greeks, as a state. The becoming-authentic of a people, the assertion of 52

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itself and the assumption of its historical mission is a process of becoming a state, of realising the Hegelian freedom in a state. The authenticity of historical, i.e., national Being, is the existence of a people as a state. A separate, punctual individual can not be authentic. Authenticity is always shared. To be in the mode of a state is not to be in any old order, but to be structured by rank, so that the people are lead by authentic leaders (Führer, Christ, Hölderlin) who bear the brunt of elementary forces and divine messages. A people is a collective brought together by the discipline of following the leaders and of sacrifices in the name of the shared logos. To follow a leader does not mean marching after a banner (even though that, too, may enter the picture), but the creative re-experiencing of the original experiences revealed and made possible by the leader. For instance, Christ does not represent the essential Christian experience. Rather, he directly is those experiences and the life gathered around them; Christ is the City of God on earth. The situation is exactly the same with regard to the Führer, who does not represent the will of the people but directly embodies it. A revolutionary state does not need representational relations, at all. This question of non-representation has to be asked again with regard to Žižek. He often praises the universalism of Christianity where the ethnic (Jewish) particularity is abandoned and quotes the Gospel according to Luke (14:26): “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters— yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” According to Žižek, Luke means that a Christian has to abandon all ethnic particularity, family, friends, even his own individuality so that universal Christianity is possible. Does this mean that Žižekian universalism is direct, in need of no representational structures? Is the leaders-followers structure and the camaraderie based upon it enough for a Žižekian collective? Freedom for the revolutionary subject is not the liberal and negative freedom of an individual, but the Hegelian dialectic freedom of self-assertion and self-governance. Already in the final pages of Being and Time, in §74, Heidegger discussed the dialectics between freedom and destiny: I choose my destiny, because my destiny in myself chooses itself. The part in me doing the choosing is not my individual self, but my shared destiny. Even so, I must choose my destiny to make the choice, or, maybe more precisely, I must make it possible for my destiny to choose itself. This genuine paradox may be made more concrete by suggesting that the idea is for me to enter into circumstances where my destiny can take place. Heidegger speaks for example of the “favour of Being” (Gunst des Seins, GA9, 310). A destiny can not be a matter of individual choice, because destiny is always collective, historical, generational. But one may in some way help one’s destiny to take hold, for instance by not avoiding the elementary forces of life (birth, death, pain, ecstasy), by enduring in struggle (against nothingness, against existential threats) and at least by not escaping into nihilistic hideouts, like illusions of a religion, of a scientific truth or something similar (in Žižek’s words, a Big Other) that would guarantee meaning for human life. The crucial point is that while there is no safe hideout there is no guaranteed non-nihilistic anti-hideout, either. There is no certain way to be chosen 53

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by one’s destiny, no guaranteed way to be destined. This is why one needs to be open to mystery, sensitive towards the non-human parts of human existence and to the presence of to deinon.61 Life is rooted and made authentic through the originary experiences of an uncovering of Being and the creative re-experiencing of those originary experiences (in fact, it does not make much sense to talk of originary experiences and their re-experiencing as separate entities). Heidegger lays special weight on the GreekGerman or Greek-European originary experiences. Therefore he can claim that his political work in the university was always directed towards saving Europeanness from an impeding catastrophe—whether that catastrophe is interpreted as liberalism or technology. One might even think that Žižek’s idea of the repetition of a revolutionary act, for instance the act of “repeating Lenin” (Žižek 2004) better than the October revolution, is a version of the Heideggerian notion of leadership, where one creatively re-enacts or re-experiences the example of the leader. For Žižek, “repeating Lenin” does not mean a slavish following of a step-by-step programme, but the creative re-filling of the symbolic space opened by Lenin. In the same way, following Christ means living the Christian experience here and now. Later on, Heidegger develops a less military form of this theory of leadership. The notion of Gelassenheit includes the idea that in terms of developing a free relationship towards things (Dinge), it does not much matter if we are surrounded by palm trees and fishnets or nuclear power plants and computers. This idea is connected to leadership, as it points out that an originary and elementary (re-)experience is primary, because it sets the relationships towards things, not the other way around. Whatever else the life of a Christian is about, it is about Mitsein, the being-with with other humans and with God that can take place under many different kinds of external circumstances (which does not mean that becoming a Christian would not have an effect on how one lives one’s life, how one gets one’s livelihood, treats other people, etc.). Life as a Christian, living according to the revelation of Being in the Christian experience, a relationship to God and to other people exemplified by Christ (love, agape, equality, and so on) can happen in different historical times, and as historical it may take different shapes that are in some way essentially similar. In essence, leadership and followership are matters of experience and not of external circumstances, not to speak matters of following rules or canons.62 The fourth item, thinking or philosophy as a national and revolutionary activity, the connection that according to Faye turns Heidegger from a philosopher to a nonphilosophical Nazi, is actually a special case of the first item, the historicity and collectivity of human existence. A consequence of being-a-people and of Mitsein is that all essential spiritual activity—whether it is thinking, philosophy, sociology, anthropology—is rooted in a historical and local understanding of Being. This is especially true of philosophy or thinking, because their essence lies in questioning, the holding-open of questions, the stirring of an understanding of Being so that it does not become petrified into certainties, but stays open and worth questioning. Herein lies the uniqueness of Heidegger’s thinking, his merit in revealing the historical nature of 54

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Being and the finitude of human existence, as well as his great un-philosophicalness, in the sense pointed out by Faye. In so far as Heidegger is rehabilitating philosophy by showing that the shelter humans give to an uncovering of Being acts as the basis for different regional ontologies and the sciences based on them, he is also showing that the historical nature of Being means the non-universal and historical nature of all science, whether the sciences want that or not. The same goes even more definitely for politics that through the measure given by the logos in the centre of the polis is always defined by a historical rank, either so that we forget the rank and treat ourselves as exchangeable empty structures, or so that we recognise true leaders and through following their example gain meaning for our struggle and work. If these four themes characterise Heidegger’s revolution in a nutshell, what should we think of Žižek’s view in the article “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933”? Žižek says that Heidegger took the right kind of step by taking part in the revolution, but the step was taken in the wrong direction, to the extreme right, when it should have been to the extreme left. In general, Žižek thinks that engagement in revolutionary action is the right conclusion from the premise of human finitude and historicity, and that Heidegger’s revolution also had some right elements (collectivity, discipline, sacrifice) but that the concrete “twist” given to these right forms was wrong. In Žižek’s Lacanian terminology, Heidegger correctly concludes that we should not live beholden to a Big Other. There is no guarantee for meaning, and therefore a meaningful life and world have to be created by living on a “groundless ground”, together as a collective, which in practice means engagement in politics. Žižek praises Heidegger because he was not a “beautiful mind” philosopher, but put himself and his career on the line, conducting arduous everyday politics in terms of structural reform on an uncertain and unpredictable terrain. As far as Žižek agrees with Heidegger on the latter’s notion of Dasein, Žižek also thinks that liberalism misunderstands human existence or, maybe more precisely, “produces” the human being wrong, unauthentically and unethically, full of ideological illusions. In politics, liberalism concentrates on “servicing the goods”, propping up a view of “there is no alternative”, and buying the consent of individuals at the lowest price, through individual freedom and material consumption. More common ground between Heidegger and Žižek can be found when Žižek notes how the mass rallies and collective organisation in terms of discipline and sacrifice that the Nazis employed were, in fact, expropriated from the leftist workers movements. So, also on the level of everyday, dirty political action Žižek sees in Heidegger things to recommend. It is to his credit that even though he knows that praising Heidegger’s revolution will get him accused of defending totalitarianism, Žižek does not back down. Party discipline and leadership in a movement are, according to Žižek, necessary parts of revolutionary politics. He grabs the bull by the horns: liberalism can be overcome only through some kind of totalitarianism. In this vein, Stalinism is the name Žižek (e.g., 2008 and 2005c) gives to the insight that liberal democracy is not the end of history and that revolutionary terror may in some cases be right and ethical.63 55

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By his provocations Žižek wants to irritate postmodernists and right-wing “orthodox” Heideggerians who both want to brush the revolutionary Heidegger under the carpet as some sort of brief and insignificant lapse. Žižek insist that in 1933 Heidegger was at his best and that especially the post-war elegiac philosophy of Being displays Heidegger’s failure. According to Žižek, Heidegger’s own realisation that Being and Time contained vestiges of a metaphysics of subjectivity is correct. Consequently, Heidegger should have held on to those remnants (Žižek 2009, 21). Accordingly, we may interpret Žižek’s own work as an attempt to continue onwards from the still subjectivist Heidegger of Being and Time. Žižek accepts Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein up to the point where the last remnants of subjectivity are still present, and continues further from there. From the metaphysics of subjectivity he takes the subject that has been purified from all that is inessential, so that only the bare minimum is left. On the face of it, Žižek seems to accept the way Heidegger makes ontology political. He goes out of his way to praise Heidegger’s revolutionary convictions. For both the attempt to overthrow and replace liberalism with something better is a more or less direct consequence of the finitude that ontologically characterises human existence. At its roots and in its fruits philosophy is a matter of engagement. But deeper down, on the level of details, what is Žižek’s relation to Heidegger’s revolution if the revolution is characterised, for instance, by the four features mentioned above? Some answers to the question have already been touched upon, in passing. Philosophy or thinking as a national project is not on Žižek’s agenda. On the contrary, the task of the minimalistic subject is to make philosophy (and politics) universal, distinct from all ethnic, linguistic or cultural substance, in the same way that Christianity is made universal by its separation from the Jewish ethnic identity. As a consequence, Žižek can not, after all, agree with Heidegger’s philosophy of being-with and of what it means to be a people. According to Žižek, Heidegger’s thought on rootedness and historicity might be on the right tracks, but does not give a proper role to the universal dimension that opens to humans through the symbolic sphere. Curiously, Heidegger (in no uncertain terms but for very obscure reasons) insists that humans are essentially different from animals, because humans have a language and a world shaped by it, while animals do not. But unlike the philosophical tradition, Heidegger does not think that the difference springs from the symbolic. Rather, both the difference between animals and humans and the possibility of the symbolic for humans are consequences of the fact that Dasein has an understanding of the ontological difference between Being and beings (which manifests itself as an awareness of death). Here Žižek sides with the tradition against Heidegger. Žižek thinks that humans are different from animals because of their symbolic language. Therefore, the agreement between Heidegger and Žižek on leadership, followership and freedom is, after all, rather shallow. It may be a symptom of this shallowness that, even on Žižekian standards, the article “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933” contains a large number of tangential discussions, so that even though the 56

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digressions in a sense stay on the subject (e.g., on Lacanian politics or on Foucault’s fascination with the Iranian revolution), after all Žižek manages to say precious little on the Heideggerian revolution in the 40-odd pages of the essay. The shallowness can also be detected in the observation on climate change and other ecological catastrophes that Žižek presents as a provocative joke. He says that we do not need more holistic thought and harmony with Mother Nature, but rather egotistic selfishness and concentration on survival (2011b, 132) The advice may be good, that is not the issue. The point is rather that Žižek’s advice is something that a techno-optimist liberalist or an enlightened capitalist would have no difficulty accepting. In contrast, in Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology it is impossible for survival to act as a goal of human life. Consequently, survival can not act as a reason to call for more egotistic selfishness. Like Žižek, Heidegger is dismissive of half-baked philosophies of value, and would not stand for any kind of New Ageism, because such views lack an appreciation of the essential struggle inherent in Being. However, for Heidegger the possibility of salvation and of a new beginning are something that are never fully in human hands. Something nonhuman—a god, a daimon, Being itself—is needed. For Žižek, a human collective is enough. According to Žižek’s self-understanding, in his and Heidegger’s thought on revolution, the reason for the deep connection between politics and philosophy and some of the forms of political action are similar. The only difference concerns the concrete “twist” given to the forms. But here we have a contradiction. The reasons for politics can not be the same—at least not identical—, if they lead to different concrete actions. Furthermore, in Heidegger’s account it is not possible to separate the form and content of politics. Žižek has not misunderstood the reasons or roots of Heidegger’s though on revolution and therefore mistaken them as the same as his own. He is well aware that Heidegger derives his revolution from historical and local experience, from the destiny of a people. Therefore, as Žižek knows, Heidegger’s revolution can not be universalised. The contradiction is not a consequence of a misunderstanding, but rather of a typically Žižekian move on the symbolic level. He separates between the content and the form of a revolution, and says that some of the forms of the National Socialist revolution where correct but the content was wrong. Is the separation between the content and the form possible or plausible? Is it possible, in particular, with regard to the revolution Heidegger had in mind? Yes, it is possible, but only with the proviso that we grant the symbolic level an autonomy in which particular contents (such as the October revolution) produce lasting structural effects (a repeatable “empty” revolutionary act). The autonomy of the symbolic is predicated on the autonomy of the subjective: the universal minimal subject is the empty form in the symbolic that each particular subject in some sense occupies. Again, we return to the circle: Žižek’s conclusion (separate form and content of revolution) is possible only if we have already accepted the existence of the minimal universal subject (the existence of which in turn depends on the separation between form and content). 57

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Žižek wants to stop at the precise point in Heideggerian Dasein-philosophy where nothing but the most minimal empty structure of the subject is left. The crucial question is, is it possible to stop there? Is Dasein-philosophy a slippery slope, where once the critique is begun, all of the metaphysics of subjectivity has to go? And does the slippery slope lead to the “wrong” revolution? Or does Žižek already have the outlines of a Heideggerian leftism? Or might it be so that Žižek’s revolution is a rhetorically updated version of the good old revolution of the enlightenment, based on the illusion of a universal subject, and made untenable by, for instance, the feminist, post-colonialist and Heideggerian critiques? NOTES 1

2

3

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According to some historical records, certain Freiburgians were especially bemused and/or irritated by Heidegger’s attempt to give a military slant to his (university-)leadership, see Safranski (1999, 253). “Wir fassen zusammen: 1. Philosophie ist der unausgesetzte fragende Kampf um das Wesen und Sein des Seienden. 2. Dieses Fragen ist in sich geschichtlich, d.h. es ist das Fordern, Hadern und Verehren eines Volkes um der Härte und Klarheit seines Schicksals willen.” (GA36/37, 12). The text comes from Heidegger’s lectures during summer 1933. The definition of philosophy here is not an offhand riposte. The purpose of the summer lectures is to define the nature of philosophy on the basis of the essence of philosophy revealed in the history of philosophy where Hegel (like Heidegger, a Schwabian!) is the key point. Therefore Heidegger also clarifies common misunderstandings and says what philosophy is not: “Philosophy is not: science, world-views, absolute knowledge, worrying over the existence of the individual.”; “Die Philosophie ist nicht: Wissenschaft, Weltanschauungsbildung, absolutes Wissen, Bekümmerung um die einzelne Existenz”) (ibid.); especially the last point is good to keep in mind, so that we do not interpret Heidegger as a philosopher who is mainly interested in the existential questions concerning individual existence (i.e., so that we do not see him as an existentialist). Earlier in the text (GA36/37, 4) Heidegger has connected the verbs “Fordern, Hadern, Verehren” to the three dimensions of temporality. The idea is that we demand what is not yet, struggle over what is and honour the greatness that has been. These temporalities give Heidegger a reason to connect the essence of philosophy with Being. The triad Fordern-Hadern-Verehren is, according to Heidegger, the questioning of our own human essence, and by questioning in this way, we are. Actually, only historical questioning for human essence (i.e., philosophy) is human existence. This is, understandably, a rather tall order. The adjective “unausgesetzte”, translated as “constant” above, also contains the meaning “without pre-set conditions”, and is included in order to separate philosophy from religious thinking, where belief or divine authority sets boundaries for questioning. The 1930’s are also the moment when Heidegger’s anti-religiosity is at its peak. He insisted, for instance, that a devoted Christian can not be a genuine philosopher and that in order to understand National Socialism one has to forsake Christianity (Ott 1993, 245-246). It is good to notice, that the identification of philosophy with a national destiny is commensurable with Being and Time, where Heidegger, in §74, famously connects authentic existence with national destiny (and in §75 nature is said to have a history; this is also a theme that Heidegger returns to in the 1930’s). Or like Christopher Rickey puts it: there is nothing German in Kant’s thought and nothing Scottish in Adam Smiths theories: “the principles of capitalism appeal to anyone interested in expanding the wealth of a nation” (2002, 213). Heidegger would reply that this is precisely the problem. In so far as Kant’s and Smith’s thoughts are not rooted in national destiny and soil, they will only propagate and foster a technological understanding of Being and its twin, the lifestyle of a free-floating liberal individual.

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5 6

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Therefore Žižek sees Marx, too, as a proponent of the minimalist notion of the subject: “No, for Marx becoming subject means being reduced to zero, to utter nothingness, this is the only way the subject operates.” Parker (2008). Žižek is here arguing against Judith Butler, but also against Marxists like Theodor Adorno or Alain Badiou. Husserl, “Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie”, (1976, 318-319, 320). In 1933, Heidegger says “The true nihilists are those who do not realise that we could not conceive of Being at all if it was not nothingness”; “Eigentliche Nihilisten sind diejenigen, die nicht einsehen, daß wir Sein gar nicht begreifen können, wenn es nicht das Nichts wäre” (cited in Faye 2009, 30) For Heidegger, nihilism is the view according to which Being, including human being, has a definite nature or character. “Der Name Heraklit ist nicht der Titel für eine längst verflossene Philosophie der Griechen. Er ist ebensowenig die Formel für das Denken einer Allerweltsmenschheit an sich. Wohl aber ist es der Name einer Urmacht des abendländisch-germanischen geschichtlichen Daseins, und zwar in ihrer ersten Auseinandersetzung mit dem Asiatischen.” (GA39, 134) What is the Asiatic? Heidegger does not say much about it. In the travel book Aufenthalte (1989, no pagination) there is a note according to which the Greeks got a “dark fire” (dunkles Feuer) from Asia. “Und wiederum genügt es nicht, diese Grundweise des Seins [das Gottsein, Menschsein, Knechtsein, Herrsein] lediglich als eine Aufzählung verschiedener Arten zu nehmen, sonder Einzig in indem Ursprungscharakter. Das will sagen: Das Wesen des Seins ist Kampf; jedes Sein geht durch Entscheidung, Sieg und Niederlag hindurch. Man ist nicht einfach nur Gott oder eben Mensch, sondern mit dem Sein ist je eine kämpferische Entscheidung gefallen und damit der Kampf in das Sein versetzt; man ist nicht Knecht, weil es so etwas unter vielen anderen auch gibt, sondern weil dieses Sein in sich eine Niederlage, ein Versagen, ein Ungenügen, eine Feigheit, ja vielleicht ein Gering- und Niedrigseinwollen birgt. Daraus wird deutlich: Der Kampf stellt ins Sein und hält darin; er macht das Wesen des Seins aus, und zwar derart, daß er alles Seiende mit Entscheidungscharakter durchsetzt, jener ständigen Schärfe der Entweder-Oder; entweder die oder ich; entweder Stehen oder Fallen. Dieser kämpferische Entscheidungscharakter alles Seins bringt in das Seiende eine Grundstimmung, die sieghafter Jubel und Wille, Furchtbarkeit des ungebändigten Andrangs (Widerstandes) zugleich ist, Erhabenheit und Grimm in einem, —was wir in einem Wort nicht zu sagen vermögen, das in der großen Dichtung der Tragiker wiederkehrt: to deinon.” (GA36/37, 95) “Πόλεμος πάντων μ ν πατήρ στι, πάντων δ βασιλεύς, καὶ το ς μ ν θεος δειξε το ς δ νθρώπους, το ς μ ν δούλους ποίησε το ς δ λευθέρους.” For instance: “War is the father and king of all; some it has made gods and some men, some slaves and some free. “Angst in ihrer tiefsten Tiefe! Nicht “Ängstlichkeit” und Furcht. Angst, die nur der große und heldische Mensch kennt! […] Was ist denn Entschlossenheit anderes als Bedingung der großen und wesentlichen Angst, sonst wäre sie ja nur unnützes und eitler Spiel und hätte nichts von Größe und Kraft.” (GA36/37, 95) “Für den wesentlichen Menschen it der Kampf die große Prüfung alles Seins: in der sich entscheidet, ob wir Knechte sind vor uns selbst oder Herren […] Unser Geschlecht—wir in der geheimnisvollen Kameradschaft mit den toten Kameraden—ist die Brücke zur geistigen geschichtlichen Eroberung des großen Krieges.” (GA16, 283-4). For Heidegger, essence (Wesen) is an active, processual phenomenon, not static. Already in Being and Time (§3) Heidegger concludes, that the measure of greatness in scientific thinking is how well it can withstand or even produce a crisis in its basic concepts. Heidegger in (GA16, 772): “We are just a passage, just a sacrifice. As combatants in this battle we must be of a hard race, that does not cling to its own, that bases itself on the people.”; “Wir sind nur ein Übergang, nur ein Opfer. Als Kämpfer dieses Kampfes müssen wir ein hartes Geschlecht habe, das nichts Eigenem mehr hängt, das sich festlegt auf den Grund des Volkes.” Translated in Pathmarks, Heidegger (1998, 252). Both of Heidegger’s sons were on the Eastern front. “Der Krieg ist noch nicht furchtbar genug für uns geworden. Die Menschen hier haben die Seele verloren—[…]” (2005, 72-73)

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One wonders what Heidegger would have made of the claim by the Mujahideen-fighter Maulana Inyadullahin in 2001: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, but we love death”? http://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/1341470/The-Americans-love-Pepsi-Cola-but-we-lovedeath.html “Feind ist derjenige und jeder, von dem eine wesentliche Bedrohung des Daseins des Volkes und seiner Einzelnen ausgeht. Der Feind braucht nicht der äußere zu sein, und der äußere ist nicht einmal immer der gefährlichere. Und es kann so aussehen, als sei kein Feind da. Dann ist Grunderfordernis, den Feind zu finden, ins Licht zu stellen oder gar erst zu schaffen, damit dieses Stehen gegen den Feind geschehe und das Dasein nicht stumpf werde. Der Feind kann in der innersten Wurzel des Daseins eines Volkes sich festgesetzt haben und dessen eigenem Wesen sich entgegenstellen und zuwiderhandeln. Um so schärfer und härter und schwerer ist der Kampf, denn dieser besteht ja nur zum geringsten Teil im Gegeneinanderschlagen; oft weit schwieriger und langwieriger ist es, den Feind als solchen zu erspähen, ihn zur Entfaltung zu bringen, ihm gegenüber sich nichts vorzumachen, sich angriffslustig zu halten, die ständige Bereitschaft zu pflegen und zu steigern und den Angriff auf weite Sicht mit dem Ziel der völligen Vernichtung anzusetzen.” (GA36/37, 90-91). See also the description of “English bourgeois-Christian Bolshevism” and the need for its extermination (GA69, 208-209). Re-published in Neske & Kettering (1998). As a political anarchist in general, or as an opponent of the Hitlerist state in particular. When, for instance, James Phillips (2005, 118) writes that Heidegger wanted “a Germany outside the control of the state”, it might be true that Heidegger detested the full control of a bureaucratic state, but otherwise he dearly wanted the Germans to form a state and, moreover, wanted that to happen in the way Hitler advocated. It is fitting, then, that Phillips reads only the Rektoratsrede and leaves both Heidegger’s other political texts and the National Socialist ideas of the state at a side. Another matter is whether Heidegger’s view on thinking, according to which thinking is without particular grounds or foundations (arche), can be described in some sense as an-archic as, for instance, Schürmann (1987) has done. “Zunächst stellten wir formal fest, daß das Volk das Seienede ist, das in der Art und Weise des Staates ist, das Staat ist oder sein kann. Formal fragten wir dann weiter. Welche Prägnung und Gestalt gibt sich das Volk im Staat, der Staat dem Volk […] Die der Ordnung? Das ist zu allgemein, denn ich kann aller ordnen, Steine, Bücher und so weiter. Wohl aber trifft eine Ordnung im Sinn von Herrschaft, Rang, Führung und Gefolgschaft die Sache.” (cited in Faye 2009, 115-116) The idea of the exemplary is another important concept in Heidegger. Petzet (1993, 176-177) describes the discussion between the Buddhist monk Bhukka Maha Mani and Heidegger. One of the highlights of the discussion is, naturally, the question of religion. The monk asks the philosopher, whether it is more important for him to create a new philosophical system or to emphasise the importance of religion. Heidegger replies that he does not have a system; what is important is to travel his path with him. Then he asks the monk, in turn, what he means by religion. Bhukka Maha Mani replies: “sayings of the founders” (1993, 176); the discussion happened in English via an interpreter. Petzet tells that Heidegger gets visibly agitated and replies that for him the decisive thing is to follow the words of the founders, not the dogma or the system: “religion is followership” (1993, 177). Petzet tells that a long silence ensues, the monk and the philosopher looking at each other. In the state and in religion, for Heidegger the crucial thing is to follow the founder, the leader, the example in the centre. “Weil das Sein als Logos ursprungliche Sammlung ist, kein Geschiebe und Gemenge, wo jegliches gleichviel und gleich-wenig gilt, gehört zum Sein der Rang, die Herrschaft. Wenn das Sein sich eröffnen soll, muß es selbst Rang haben und innehalten. Daß Heraklit von den Vielen als den Hunden und Eseln spricht, kennzeichnet diese Haltung. Sie gehört wesentlich zum griechischen Dasein. Wenn man schon bisweilen heute allzu eifrig die Polis der Griechen bemuht, sollte man diese Seite nicht unterschlagen, sonst wird der Begriff der Polis leicht harmlos und sentimental. Das Rangmaßige ist das Starkere. Deshalb ist das Sein, der Logos, als der gesammelte Einklang, nicht leicht und in gleicher Munze fur jedermann zuganglich, sondern entgegen jenem Einklang, der jeweils nur Ausgleich, Vernichtung der Spannung, Einebnung ist, verborgen: ‘ ρμονίη φαν ς φανερ ς κρείττων’

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‘der nicht (unmittelbar und ohne weiteres) sich zeigende Einklang ist machtiger denn der (allemal) offenkundige’ (Frg. 54).” (GA40, 141-142) Homer. The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. Available at: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=1:card=1 “Was heißt polis? Status heißt Zustand, status rei publicae = Zustand der öffentlichen Dinge […]. Dieser Staat hat mit polis gar nichts zu tun, polis ist auch nicht die Gemeinschaft der politeia. Was polis ist, erfahren wir schon auf Homer, Odyssee, VI. Buch, vers 9 ff. ‘Um die polis herum zog er (fuhr er) mit einer Mauer, und baute Häuser und Tempel der Götter und teilte aus das Ackerland.’ Polis ist so die eigentliche Mitte des Daseinbereiches. Diese Mitte ist eigentlich der Tempel und der markt, auf dem die Versammlung det politeia stattfindet, polis ist die eigentlich bestimmende Mitte des geschichtlichen Dasein des Volkes, eines Stammes, einer Sippe; das, worum sich das Leben Abspielt; die Mitte, auf die alles bezogen ist, um dessen Schutz als Selbstbehauptung es geht. Das wesentlich des Daseins ist Selbstbehauptung. Mauer, Haus, Land, Götter. Von hier aus ist das Wesen des Politischen zu begreifen.” (cited in Faye 2009, 237). The testimonies on Heidegger’s personal courage and militarism are somewhat contradictory. During the First World War he worked as a censor and observing the weather. The heart condition that appeared during his study years might be one reason for not being sent to the front. Some signs of overcompensation can be detected in that after the war Heidegger at least sometimes presented his war experience as more dangerous and heroic than reality warranted. It is striking that during the last days of the Second World War, when the ageing Heidegger would have been called to the front, he first avoided service and then moved away from the approaching front. During the occupation, he got special privileges for himself and his family from the French, and eluded some of the hardships that ordinary Germans underwent. One would think that especially this would grate the nerves of some who idolise Heidegger as a German hero. On the other hand, friends have described Heidegger as a hardened outdoor person and physically courageous skier (Petzet 1993, chapter 8). Heidegger himself insisted on the character-forming experience of the First World War. It was his generational experience. “Der Führer selbst und allein ist die heutige und kunftige deutsche Wirklichkeit und ihr Gesetz.” (GA16, 184). Heidegger writes on October 17., 1918, to Elfride “Nur noch die Jugend wird uns retten” (2005, 85)—I have amalgamated that sentence with the title of the Spiegel interview. In the letter Heidegger reproaches the shallowness of his contemporaries and hopes that the youth can discover a creative spirit. The most extensive description of the Wissenschaftslager can be found in Ott (1993, 224-234), see also Faye (2009, chapter 3), Farias (1991). Milchman & Rosenberg (1997) emphasise the continuity between the aims of Heidegger’s rectorship and the rest of his career: the first lecture Heidegger gave in Freiburg in 1919 as Privatdozent—to a crowd of veterans returning from the war!—was called “Über das Wesen der Universität und des akademischen Studiums” (GA56/57). “Dieser Schlag von Studenten ‘studiert’ nicht mehr, d.h. er bleibt nicht irgendwohin geborgen sitzen, um dort aus im Sitzen irgendwohin nur zu ‘streben’. Dieser neue Schlag der Wissenswollenden ist jederzeits unterwegs. Dieser Student aber wird zum Arbeiter.” (GA16, 204). “Die Arbeit versetzt und fügt das Volk in das Wirkungsfeld aller wesentlichen Mächte des Seins. Das in der Arbeit und als Arbeit sich gestaltende Gefüge des völkischen Daseins ist der Staat. Der nationalsozialistische Staat ist der Arbeiterstaat.” (GA16, 205-206) See, e.g., chapter 9 in Löwy (1973). Here Žižek is, of course, right: voluntary physical work for a common goals is, as such, in no way “Fascistic”. Faye (2009, 67) asks—with obvious malicious intent—what uniform might the rector himself have carried? It is inconceivable that after his letter he would have worn a bourgeois attire on the march. Faye mentions having seen a postcard depicting Heidegger in front of a SA march in Freiburg, but it is not clear when the picture is taken.

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“Vor Acht Tagen hatte ich in Todtnauberg das erste Lager—ich habe viel gelernt. In der Mitte der Lagerzeit müßte ich aber 20 Leute entlassen—die nicht dahin paßten. So ein lager ist eine große probe—für jeden—und gefährlich –[…]” (GA16, 178) Ott (1993, 230-231) claims even that Heidegger sent one of his closest and most important followers, Rudolf Stadelmann, away from the camp in order to test Stadelmann’s devotion to his spiritual Führer; at least Stadelmann himself experienced the matter so. Unlike, for instance, John Zerzan (1994) who sees atomising division of labour as the kernel of civilisation; the kernel that in modern times has reached its absurd pinnacle. “Es gibt nur einem einzigen deutschen ‘Lebensstand’. Das ist der in den tragenden Grund des Volkes gewurzelte und in den geschichtlichen Willen des Staates frei gefügte Arbeitsstand, dessen Prägung in der Bewegung der nationalsozialistischen deutschen Arbeiterpartei vorgeformt wird.” (GA16, 239) One interesting topic to explore would be Heidegger’s relationship to the head (Haupt). Philosophers have commented on his philosophy of the hand and on the aural and olfactory qualities of his theorising, but what is the status of the head and “setting of the head” (Selbstbehauptung) in Heidegger’s thought, when compared, for instance, with Bataille’s aim of getting rid of the head (acéphale)? At first sight, acéphale and Selbstbehauptung seem diametrically opposite, even though Heidegger’s idea of selfgovernment contains severe anti-intellectual and anti-cognitive elements. Perhaps the tendency to “bring things to a head” is one of the symptoms of Heidegger’s general centripetal and rank-loving attitude, a tendency that Bataille avoids by relying on the heterogeneity of society and the thought on society. “Bloße Meinungen und Theorien sind nicht wirkfähig, bloße Programme und Organisationen haben keine Bindekraft—sondern nur das Eine: Herz bei Herz und Mann bei Mann.” (GA16, 284) For this reason—the need to shake up petrified organisational structures—Heidegger sympathised with the students during the 1967-68 uprisings; Lyon (2006, 205). Along these lines Heidegger complained to his former pupil Karl Löwith in Rome in 1936 that the situation would have been much better if “certain gentlemen” of the intelligentsia would not have been shy of getting their hands dirty. He also expressed his concern over the fact that “organisation” and finding constant form was displacing “lively forces” in the movement. Still, Heidegger assured Löwith that Nazism was the right course for Germany and that the movement should be given more time to deliver on its promise (Löwith 1993, 60). “Die Kamradschaft prägt den Einzelnen über sich hinaus und schlägt ihn in das Gepräge eines ganz eigenen schlages der Jungmannschaft […]. Der eigenbrödlerische Einzelne ebenso wie die zuchtund richtungslose Masse werden zerschlagen von der Schlagkraft dieses Schlages junger Menschen.” (GA16, 204) One recent description of revolution outside the sphere of the state is John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002). Clastres (1989) describes how “primitive” stateless societies persistently and continuously thwart the ever-present drift toward state forms. “Der Staat ist die wirklichste Wirklichkeit, die in einem neuen, ursprünglichen Sinn dem ganzen Sein einen neuen Sinn geben muß. Die höchste Verwirklichung menschlichen Seins geschieht im Staat.” (cited in Faye 2009, 149) Moreover, Heidegger thinks that a similar order of rank holds between nations organised as states. Therefore he advocates Hitler’s initiative to detach Germany from the artificial and unnecessary League of Nations (GA16, 333). “Man hat besagt, 1933 ist Hegel gestrorben; im Gegenteil: er hat erst angefangen zu leben” (cited in Faye 2009, 389). “Was Hegel unter Freiheit versteht, wir nicht begreifen können, wenn wir es als Wesensbestimmung eines einzelnen Ich nehmen. […] Freiheit nur Wirklich ist, wo eine Gemeinschaft von Ichen, Subjekten da ist.” (cited in Faye 2009, 225). “[…] die neue Bewegung die durch dieses Volk geht, ist die tiefste und weiteste Sorge um die Freiheit des Volkes. Und Freiheit heißt uns nicht die Ungebundenheit des Tuns und Lassens, sondern heißt: Bindung an das innerste Gesetz und die Ordnungen unserer Wesens. […] Das ist der eigentliche Sinn des deutschen Sozialismus. Er bedeutet keine bloße Änderung der Wirtschaftgesinnung; er meint nicht

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eine öde Gleichmacherei; er besagt nicht das wahllose Betreiben eines ziellosen Gemeinwohles.” (GA16, 281). “Der deutsche Sozialismus ist der Kampf um die Maßstäbe und Gesetze der unserem Volke wesensgemäßen Ordnungen; der deutsche Sozialismus will Rangordnung nach innerer Bewährung und Leistung; er will die Unbedingtheit des Dienstes und die unantastbare Ehre jeder Arbeit. Das heißt uns Freiheit des Volkes.” (GA16, 282) “Der große Krieg muß von uns geistig erobert werden, d.h. der Kampf wird zum innersten Gesetz unser Dasein.” (GA16, 283) “Aber die Befreiung zu dieser Freiheit verlangt die völlige Unschaffung des ganzen Gefüges des Volkes—seiner Gruppen, Berufe, Schichten und jedes Einzelnen.” (GA16, 282) On Nazi economy, see Tooze (2007). Also Bataille’s (1989/1933,156) observation is pertinent: in Italy the corporativism of Fascism suited the capitalists as a solution to the problem of proletariat, whereas in Germany the capitalists liked Nazism because it sheltered German industry from competition both inside Germany and internationally. Consequently, according to Bataille, Fascism and Nazism do not share an economic foundation (for instance, in the Marxists sense, in the class war between capitalists and the proletariat) but rather a “psychological” or experiential foundation. On the international propagation of the Nazi revolution, see Mazower (2009). The idea that Germans had to obey a totalitarian rule is partly a myth, supported by the last years of the war and, naturally, by the Germans’ bad conscience after the war. Even the genocide was to an extent perpetrated by eager volunteers. For instance, the special police forces in Poland where recruited out of ordinary men, not party loyalists, and they faced either no punishment at all or very lenient chastisement if they refused to participate in mass-murder (see, e.g., Goldhagen 1997). The sheer scale of the murdering in a sense forced the Nazis to use volunteers, prisoners and various technical means, since to murder great numbers of humans repeatedly is not easy for (most) humans. Žižek (2007a, 18). Žižek writes (2006a, 289, see also 2005): “[I]n today’s Germany there are many CD’s on the market featuring old GDR revolutionary and Party songs—but we look in vain for a CD featuring Nazi Party songs.” By coincidence, I happened to read the sentence on the same day that the media reported demonstrations supporting the release of the neo-Nazi musician Michael Regner from Tegel prison. (“Neo-nazis rally for jailed singer”, BBC World News, October 21., 2006). Otto Pohl (2000, 271) concludes: “Information released from the former Soviet archives in the last 10 years supports the argument that the Stalin regime did indeed commit genocide against the ‘Repressed Peoples.’ The Soviet government sought to destroy these groups as distinct ethnic identities.” The perspectives that people had on the National Socialist revolution varied widely and therefore they had very different ideas of what they were taking part in. One extreme is the Finnish writer Olavi Paavolainen’s (1936, 228) description of Nazism as the first European religion. Paavolainen’s account corresponds in broad outline well with Heidegger’s view of Nazism as anti-bourgeois rebirth of spiritual values (and conveniently forgets that there were religions in Europe well before Christianity—but it seems like neither Paavolainen nor Heidegger would have thought of those as European religions). The other extreme is the pseudonym “T” that Löwith (1992, 76) describes: he participated in the Nazi revolution because it gave the possibility of applying rational and scientific means on the development of society. The eco-philosopher Pentti Linkola sees Nazism as some kind of amalgam of rational, biologically oriented dictatorship and culture-friendly ecological rustic life, combining the two extremes rather nicely. As Safranski (1999, 230) reminds, also some Jews were enthusiastic about the Nazi revolution. German accounts most often emphasise the impact of World War I and the need to overcome the humiliation and destitution after the Weimar collapse; the overwhelming feeling is one of overcoming, of a new beginning, of youth and rejuvenation and a kind of catharsis. Löwith repeatedly highlights the importance of an awareness of crisis as the background to Heidegger’s thinking and Nazism (1992, 37, 43, 63, 74). In his letter to Elfride Petri on October 5., 1918, Heidegger (2005, 83) wonders why philosophy and spirituality in general is often seen as alien to life or as passivity. He himself sees them first and foremost as activities (Aktivität). A characteristic manifesto follows: “Der Geist trifft den, den er treffen soll u. von diesen Getroffenen aus treibt eine Welle um die andere aufrüttelnd, schwingend u. In Schwingung haltend in die Vielheit der Trägen u. Massigen u. Massenhaften. Diese eingeborene Vehemenz des

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Geistes macht all das überflüssig, was als praktische Lebensphilosophie die bereichnung Philosophie mißbraucht—Heben wir erst mal wider das volle vertrauen zum Geist, dann gelangen wir in den Stand, unreflektierte schöpferische Kultur wiedererstehen u. Erleben näher bringen.”; in this context the vehemence of spirit is noteworthy: it is no fun being favoured by the spirit, unlike the peddlers of “practical philosophies of life” would have us believe. Heidegger’s conflict with Catholicism is crystallised around the idea of experience. According to Heidegger, Catholicism has lost an authentic relation to the experience of being a Christian. This experience has been replaced by a stiff and alienated world of forms, especially in scholastic theology which following Aristotle interpreted God as a being (Philipse 1998, 184; Rickey 2002, ch. 1). This criticism is present in Heidegger early on, and during the revolution he widens its scope to include Lutheran Christianity. Heinrich Buhr’s report on the 1933 Wissenschaftslager is famous: according to Buhr, Heidegger attacked Christianity in toto. Heidegger asked the participants to abandon both the thesis that Jesus was the Son of God as well as the the thesis that the world was created by God. According to Heidegger, the idea of the world as an artefact created by God gives a false sense of security, while, in fact, the purpose should be a noble and great experience of the uncertainty and groundlessness of life (Ott 1993, 227). Consequently, a believing Christian is not, according to Heidegger, fit to serve the National Socialist university (Ott 1993, 245-246). Heidegger was in tight contact with the National Socialist student union (Stadelmann writes to Heidegger after the camp: “I understand well that the goal is a SA-student”) and at the same time worked against the Catholic student union in Freiburg. Buhr’s report gives evidence of a kind of anti-theism that seems not to be in evidence in Heidegger’s published texts. It is hard to establish if Heidegger had separate exoteric and esoteric teachings. Some indication that such a separation may have been on his mind is given by the topos “the unique ones, the few, the many” (Einzelne, Wenige, Viele) discussed e.g., in Beiträge (GA65, 96-97). Here Heidegger not only describes three spiritually different groups of people, but also points out that different kinds of people need (and deserve?) different kinds of teaching. In any case it is obvious that Heidegger expressed himself much more directly and unambiguously in speech than in writing, as witnessed by the seminar notes cited by Faye and the notes on the Zollikon-seminars together with Medard Boss (Heidegger 2006). One interesting perspective on Heidegger’s writing is provided by Elfride Heidegger. She sent one of Martin’s early love letters to the literature archive in Marbach accompanied with the note “a model for several future love letters”—the reader is left to conclude that such letters poured not only to Elfride but to others, as well. In the only letter by Elfride Heidegger published in the collection Mein liebes Seelchen (Heidegger 2005, 314-315) she points out that Martin is in the habit of turning metaphorical and high-strung—even formulaic—while writing of difficult matters, such as love or his extra-marital affairs and the repentance caused by them. Letters in this category are often an impenetrable thicket of abstraction, reminiscent of Heidegger’s theoretical jargon at its most obtuse. Another category of letters—as well as philosophical texts—displays a clear and direct style. One is lead to the suspicion that both in the letters and in his philosophical writings Heidegger is not at his best while writing in a highly abstract and metaphorical language and that the reader should pay special attention to the direct and clear passages. It is quite amusing that the best parody of Heidegger’s jargon and basic conceptual moves is written under the pseudonym Professor Feldweger by one of his mistresses, princess Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen (Zimmermann 2005, 33-34). See, e.g., Žižek (2008) and (2006c).

CHAPTER 4

WHAT IS WRONG IN HEIDEGGER’S REVOLUTION?

One of the consequences of Heidegger’s active participation in the National Socialist revolution is that the year 1933 functions as a kind of prism, separating Heideggerians and Heidegger’s detractors into different groups. At the same time, the different views and critiques provide light on Heidegger’s thought on revolution. The conundrum that Heidegger was both a Nazi and possibly the most influential philosopher of the 20th century forms a kind of entry-level exam for all wannabe revolutionary philosophers. This is also the reason why Heidegger’s thought on revolution forms a necessary background for Žižek. A SMALL MAN LIVING IN HARD TIMES

Maybe the saddest but still quite an understandable apology—heard from some of Heidegger’s pupils1, from some commentators who haven’t looked at the matter in detail and from many orthodox Heideggerians who want to continue along the lines of the defence prepared by Heidegger himself—is the claim that Heidegger was basically an apolitical man, not very well aware of social questions, who is swept away, very briefly, in the powerful current of Nazism. Often the claim is combined with the general backdrop that philosophers and deep thinkers are not even supposed to be very sensitive towards their immediate surroundings. They deal with grander, deeper, if not eternal things. Forwarded by a philosopher, such a view is understandable, because it at the same time provides its presenter a kind of diplomatic immunity. For the same reason it is very sad, implying that philosophy should happen in an ivory tower (and, by being a comment on philosophy and politics, it manages to pull the rug from under itself). When the claim is made about Heidegger, it is particularly offensive, for several reasons. First, Heidegger himself though that his philosophy—especially its best and deepest insights—was political. Second, Heidegger knew the political, ideological, philosophical and practical thinking of the National Socialist movement much better than many (maybe even better than any) of those describing his Nazism as a “brief” and “erroneous” engagement in something he supposedly did not know well enough. Third, the claim obliterates the possibility, noted by Žižek, that Heidegger was at his best as a philosopher in the 1930’s when he took up militant everyday politics as an alternative to a reclusive Hütte-Dasein. The best and most crystallized form of the “small man, bad times” apology is presented by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Martin Heidegger ist achtzig Jahre alt” (1989), written by Arendt in honour of her teacher’s birthday.2 Arendt begins by talking about the roots of thinking in wonderment, thaumazein, in stopping to take 65

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in the simple, and especially in whiling in that wonderment at the simple, which, according to her, was Heidegger’s unique gift. Thinking brings close that which is far and therefore necessarily leaves that which is close—for instance, in perception— unattended. This plain fact is the reason why thinkers are often unaware of the things that are the closest and most important to those who are not in deep thought— Arendt reminds of Thales falling to the well while gazing to the sky. She sums up her view by saying that the inclination towards tyrants—as exemplified by Plato and Heidegger—is for philosophers a kind of professional hazard, “deformation professionelle.” According to Arendt’s eloquent apology, Heidegger didn’t actually take part in politics at all, at least not with his thinking. Heidegger’s thinking sprung from something originary and simple and resulted in something nearly perfect and timeless. He just happened to live during a century filled with tyranny and oppression. So his participation in politics was no more or no less problematic than the participation of any ordinary German. For Heidegger, thinking was of the essence, and thinking was a matter of the simple, originary and profoundly philosophical questions, while Nazism was something temporary, fleeting and mundane. Arendt speaks of “ten feverish months” as if Heidegger’s Nazism was some kind of passing infection. Let us first deal with the detail of the ten months of rectorship. Arendt and the “small man in bad times” apologists in general accept much too uncritically Heidegger’s post-war line of defence, according to which the rectorship was his only overt Nazi activity. The fact is, however, that after the rectorship Heidegger continued and started new national level activities on National Socialist educational politics. As an example of a continuing campaign, Heidegger was pushing for a national Dozent-academy to be established in Berlin, the task of which was to be the National Socialist re-education of university teachers. Heidegger was even toying with the idea of becoming the director of the Academy himself (Safranski 1999, Farias 1991). However, the project was not realised due to internal conflicts and disagreements.3 As a new activity, Heidegger became a member of the committee for the philosophy of justice in the Academy for German Law (Ausschuß für Rechtphilosophie der Akademie für Deutsches Recht). The committee was not any old club for discussion. It was granted official consultant status by the Reich. In addition to Heidegger, members included Hans Frank, Carl Schmitt, Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher, all National Socialist ideologues of first rank (Faye 2009, 205-207). It is absolutely impossible that Heidegger would have been included in the committee in May 1934 if his stepping down from the rectorship in April had been perceived as a rebuttal or abandonment of National Socialist ideals. Likewise, it is impossible that Heidegger would have accepted the invitation if the end of the rectorship had marked an end of his active work for the National Socialist revolution, not to speak of a loss of faith in its ideals. After the rectorship, Heidegger changed his role and tactics, not his goals. As Faye (2009, 207) rightly points out, the membership in the committee is a much more incriminating fact than the rectorship. This for two reasons. First, the membership comes after the rectorship, 66

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nullifying the claim that the end of the rectorship was the end of Heidegger’s public Nazi engagement. Second, the membership means that Heidegger took part (at the very least by affiliating his name in public with the committee) in preparing the ground and thinking behind National Socialist legislation, including the infamous Nuremberg racial laws that went into effect in 1935. Here, too, the suggestion that Heidegger didn’t realise the nature of the politics he was involved in runs counter the facts. Heidegger knew much better than many others on what kind of thinking the racial laws of the Third Reich were based: he served in an official position with some of the main architects of the legislation. In the public eye the participation in the committee together with Streicher—a cruel and mean racist if there ever was one—already was enough to tell that Heidegger knew what he was into. When Löwith in 1936 took up the issue of Streicher, Heidegger had the minimal decency of playing the Hitler card that was typical in the Germany of the time. According to Löwith (1993, 60), Heidegger wondered why Hitler put up with Streicher and did not get rid of him. The sad truth is that Heidegger himself did nothing to shut up Streicher. Rather, he gave his own authority and expertise to the committee together with Streicher. To return to Arendt, the failure to find out or to acknowledge all the facts is one thing. The more striking philosophical paradox is that Arendt, who most persuasively formulates the case that philosophers should not be expected to excel in public affairs, herself as an engaged intellectual proved that that is exactly what one may expect from a philosopher. Through her own work and life Arendt cancels her apology, and sets the case against Heidegger on a firm footing: if the seamless combination of political activity and philosophical thought was possible for Hannah, it should be the standard also for Martin.4 As Žižek notes in “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933”, Arendt was the first liberal Heideggerian, which naturally is a contradiction in terms. Liberal Heideggerianism is possible only through watering down Heidegger’s revolutionary, i.e., anti-liberal, aspects. Arendt’s apology fits well with her well-known thesis on the banality of evil (Arendt 1968). If evil is not “deep”, but rather is born when ordinary family fathers and mothers follow the orders of their superiors and the spirit of the times, then it is understandable that Heidegger might also have erred in the strong winds of his times, especially because his main task was to deal with big, timeless thought. However, like Žižek (2007a) points out, Arendt runs into problems when trying to combine Heidegger and democracy: some parts of democracy have to be left out for the combination to be possible in the first place. What does Arendt leave out? The idea that democracy is a matter of individual choice over pre-existing preferences. In contrast to this, Arendt develops her own notion of democracy, in which it is seen as the highest form of praxis, in fact, the pinnacle of Heideggerian skilful and rooted being-in-the-world. For Arendt, democracy is not a matter for the thin and narrow rational intellect, but rather embedded in physical, social and productive practices. As a consequence, it becomes hard for Arendt to present examples of functioning democracy. Western representational democracies will not 67

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do. Even in its diluted form Heideggerianism—the Arendtian democracy—is too far from liberal ideals. THE LIBERAL CRITICISM: TOO MUCH POSTMODERNISM

In comparison to the “small man in bad times” apology, the liberal criticism is straightforward and in a sense more honest. The criticism is that Heidegger becomes a National Socialist because like the Nazis he has forsaken universal reason and communicability. Different shades of this critique are presented, for instance, by Emmanuel Faye, Richard Wolin and Jürgen Habermas. A consequence of the liberal critique is that Heidegger’s philosophy is not really philosophy (Faye) or that it is almost criminally dangerous philosophy (Wolin). Often, the criticism aims at discrediting also “Heidegger’s children” (Wolin, 2003) or all sorts of post-modernists by the same stroke. Like Heidegger and the Nazis, and following Heidegger’s example, the postmodernists disregard the criteria of universal reason and end up in all kinds of crazy inconsistencies. As a matter of fact, so goes the critique, they can end up with pretty much anything, because the starting point is already irrational. According to the liberal criticism, then, Heidegger’s mistake is too much postmodernism, the slumber of reason opening the floodgates for monsters. Given its starting points and presupposition, the liberal criticism is correct and identifies Heidegger’s mistake accurately. Heidegger himself says many times— including on the opening pages of Being and Time—that his philosophical pursuit, fundamental ontology, happens in an area where classical logic and reason are not the highest authorities. It is true also that one reason for the Nazi crimes was the antienlightenment and anti-rationalist ethos of the movement. The liberal criticism is one of the best criticisms of Heidegger, because it hits all three: Heidegger, Nazism and Heidegger’s Nazism. The strength of the liberal criticism is also its weakness. By presupposing that universal reason is the most essential arbiter in philosophy and the most important or precious part in humanity, the liberal view simply bypasses the Heideggerian or any other type of critique towards Enlightenment rationality. What if behind or under or as a condition of reason there really is something stronger, more originary and even more wise than reason itself? Few have retained their faith in the objectivity and interest-free nature of reason after the mole-work by Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan and many others. Heidegger, too, belongs in this list of moles, digging his tunnels beneath the cornerstones of Western metaphysics. More importantly, the same group of moles has also been active in constructing an account of human being and human knowledge as engaged, socially and physically rooted. The liberal criticism has, after all, a much too high estimate of its own value. What is Žižek’s relationship to the liberal critique, considering that he presents himself as anti-liberal but still as an Enlightenment philosopher? Žižek is too sophisticated and dialectical to demand that philosophy be tied down with the ideals of, say, Habermasian communicative reason—too sophisticated or too Hegelian, 68

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Marxist and Lacanian. As a dialectician, Žižek knows that inside every good concept lives a part of its opposite. Otherwise the concept is dead. As a Lacanian he knows that if one stubbornly pushes forward through exclusively rational means, one ends up with something distinctly irrational. But still Žižek wants, in the end, more science and technology, healthy egoism, communism and other rational and universal things. Where does the universality come from? It can not anymore be based on the particular structures, skills or capacities of the human subject, since these have been minimalised away. What is left is the Hegelian negative possibility of always overcoming those particularities. Žižek is not a one-track philosopher of Enlightenment who would think that the road from the ideals of reason to their actualisation is straight. Far from it: the road is near impossible and it is the duty of the philosopher to point that out. But does not the notion of human universality as the Hegelian, negative ability to cut away any particularity, to negate and start anew sound a little like—Nietzsche? In some of his most direct words, Heidegger says that contemporary reality is what Nietzsche called the will to power and that all thinking that sees only this will-to-power reality is metaphysical. Metaphysical thinking propagates the increase of the will to power, calculates how the will can be best fostered. Therefore Heidegger calls it also calculative thinking. Is not Žižek’s description of the minimalistic subject in effect a pure atom of the will to power, the smallest (and genealogically first) gesture in the process of will to power?5 Closely related to the liberal criticism is the view that sets emphasis on the critique of technology and other “green” ideas in the later Heidegger, and tries to separate Heidegger the Nazi from Heidegger the Hippie. Like the liberal criticism, part of the ecologist wing of Heideggerians believe that in the 1930’s Heidegger distanced himself from reason and communication and embraced irrational politics. But it so happened that this irrational form of politics, Nazism, was at least as technologyoriented as Western democracy or Eastern Bolshevism. Heidegger learns his lesson, and turns after the war towards the Far East and the arts, finally becoming a mystical prophet of Gelassenheit. So this view proposes that Heidegger understands technology even deeper and knows its dangers from the inside, because he once was lured by its promise. There is lot to be said in favour of this view. Heidegger’s view of technology is always beyond a Manichean black-or-white choice. Technology is the way that Being is understood and revealed these days, therefore it is not “good” or “bad”, and therefore it makes no sense to “resist” it. On the contrary, Heidegger often sees a possibility for overcoming technology precisely where technology gets its fullest and most perfect realisation. Herein lies also the importance of Jünger. Heidegger thinks that Jünger is unsurpassed in his description of the reality of the Nietzschean will to power, in Jünger’s terms “total mobilisation”. In harmony with this, Heidegger sees in Nazism— already before the end of the war—a genuine phenomenon of total mobilisation and technological reality. Precisely because of its genuinely technological nature Nazism also presents a possibility for the overcoming of metaphysics. For Heidegger, Nazism 69

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might really have been the political system for our technological age. But here we must make a distinction. There are two types of genuinely technological Nazism in the sense of Nazism that corresponds to the technological era. On one hand there is the Nazism that has misunderstood itself, that is materialist and without spirit, that like vulgar Marxist theories sees values and ideologies as the superstructure determined by the material or even biological. Whereas a certain kind of Marxism sees the ideological superstructure defined by the mode of production, materialist Nazism sees the superstructure (culture, society) as determined by blood and race. Heidegger is honest when he insists that he always opposed this kind of Nazism, even though also this kind of Nazism was for him a metaphysical phenomenon, in exactly the same way as Americanism and Bolshevism. On the other hand we have the non-material type of Nazism, the one fervently supported and never denounced by Heidegger, in which the technological understanding on Being is at all times accompanied by a struggle-filled insistence on the question of Being. This kind of metaphysical Nazism that could possibly encounter the age of technology in a fruitful way would, crudely put, entail dissolving one’s individual and egotistic self into the völkisch, national field of experience in which the green shoots of a new historical era are sheltered and appear through committed work. Like noted above, a genuine political act, one which founds a nation, is one of the forms in which a new god can appear, and therefore the “second beginning” (repeating Greek antiquity) and thinking have their role in preparing the ground for politics.6 In this kind of non-materialist Nazism total mobilisation is not the reason or the goal, but rather the form in which reality today is, and therefore it can not be avoided, but rather must be—if not embraced—at least endured and completed (Vollendung) while one prepares the readiness for a new beginning. Heidegger thought that the best elements of the National Socialist movement and revolution were on the way to this direction, were taking the steps towards a new collective and political experience of technology. However, in the end the National Socialist party—and possibly, Germans, more generally—betrayed both the movement and Heidegger. Consequently, Heidegger can claim that the result of the war decided nothing. After the war, one had to start anew by re-examining how the seeds of a non-technological understanding of Being can be kept alive during a “thoughtless time”. This view on the later mystical-green Heidegger agrees with Žižek’s categorisation of the different phases of Heidegger but disagrees on their evaluation. From the ecological point of view, the post-war Heidegger is the best Heidegger, because then Heidegger’s thinking goes furthest away from Western prejudices and at the same time stays closest to a Western form of a non-technological understanding of nature. After World War II, Heidegger is at his most apolitical, and most palatable to neopaganism, Christians and Buddhists alike. For the same reason, for Žižek this is the weakest Heidegger. However, the ostentatious apoliticalness of the later Heidegger is a thin veneer and in no real contradiction with the activism of the 1930’s. Already in the early 70

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20th century, being “apolitical” was in Germany synonymous with conservative authoritarianism. Like Wolin (1990, 23-24), amongst others, has noted, the antimodernism of the German intelligentsia was socio-political. “Non-politicalness” meant that one believed in the superiority of German high culture, in distinction from the bland averageness of bourgeois civilisation. This “apoliticalness” was inherently political, because it not only accepted but sought to advance the special status of German culture and encouraged its self-defence, up to the point of aggression. Inside Germany itself, being “apolitical” meant an anti-democratic stance in favour of existing power relations—if it didn’t mean active work towards deepening the crisis so that the new can replace the rotten old.7 This is a part of the context when Heidegger in the Spiegel-interview says that in 1933 he was an “apolitical” person who got drawn into politics through the university. “Apoliticalness” was always ready to slide frictionlessly towards active conservative revolutionary politics. In addition to this general background, the (a)politicalness of Heidegger is characterised by what Christopher Rickey (2002) calls antinomian politics, often connected to religious convictions. By antinomian politics Rickey means a form of politics that oscillates between two seemingly opposite poles. The other extreme is a complete withdrawal from society, either through a spiritual distance (“give to Caesar what is his”) or through building a separate and self-sufficient community (like the Amish). The other extreme is a ruthless and unconditional implementation of religious values in society—the attitude that these days is called fundamentalism. Heidegger’s deeply catholic childhood and his roots in the catholic community of Meßkirch which was torn between the group loyal to Rome and the so-called Altkatoliker, gave him an understanding of politics rooted in religious views. The antinomian attitude is present in all of Heidegger’s phases. In the early Heidegger, bubbling under the “apolitical” phenomenological surface there is always a note of radical social critique and calls for total overhaul. In the middle Heidegger we have the unbridled outbreak of a “fundamentalist” mode of politics, where the originary Greek-German values are to be realised after the 2500 years of decline. Finally, in the later Heidegger, the “apolitical” retreat returns, coupled again with an obviously political attempt at keeping the seeds of a non-technological thinking alive in cells of resistance. In both its “active” and “passive” modes antinomian politics is decisively anti-liberal. That is why the liberal interpreters often correctly recognise the overall shape of Heidegger’s thinking and also why they often remain fundamentally untouched by it and therefore ineffective in their criticism. DECISIONISM

Heidegger has been accused of decisionism, i.e., of engaging in Nazism because for him the decisiveness of action was the real measure of politics. Here, too, Heidegger is seen as a too postmodern thinker who discards the intersubjective ethical criteria that bind a modern individual. The claim is that as a decisionist, Heidegger sees politics in terms of decisions and decisiveness in general (Entscheidung, Entschlossenheit), 71

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not in terms of the ethical contents of the decisions. The classic account is von Krockow’s Die Entscheidung from 1958, in which von Krockow compares the views of Heidegger, Jünger and Carl Schmitt. His thesis is that for these three, politics is a matter of decisions, choosing one’s side and one’s enemies and following a leader. Like Heidegger, the claim goes, neither Jünger nor Schmitt as conservative revolutionaries say much about what side to choose or what leader to follow. The main point is to choose and to have a leader. Out of the three, Schmitt is explicitly a decisionist, one of the main proponents of the view. Schematically, Schmitt thinks that law and legitimacy are based on a state of exception, on violence that grounds the law and so disappears from view. The violent state of exception is the real origin of sovereignty and thus the root of all power. The Schmittian sovereign decides on the state of exception, in which laws cease to function and a new law is founded. Here decisionism means that the state of exception and consequently the law are not based on anything else than a decision: “so be it!” To be capable of such a sovereign decision is the pinnacle of politics. Some good support for the accusation of decisionism can be found from Being and Time, in which Heidegger says that authentic Dasein is characterised by resoluteness and choosing a hero. Resoluteness is needed for keeping Dasein open against the pressure of das Man, it is needed for owning one’s anxiety-filled situation (§60). At the same time, the fundamental ontology in Being and Time is explicitly a matter of description without any ethical normativity. The resoluteness needed for authenticity is not a subjective feeling and the resolution is not made by an individual subject (§74). In other words, a resolute and authentic Dasein is not ethically any better than an irresolute and inauthentic one, simply because resoluteness and authenticity (and das Man) are purely descriptive concepts used to portray the phenomenological structures of Dasein. One can not really give any account of the contents of resoluteness or authenticity in terms of fundamental ontology. And therein lies Heidegger’s problem, according to von Krockow. Dasein must be resolute with regard to its situation and it must choose a hero, but the problem is that any hero is as good as any other, as long as the structure of leadership-followership is correct. On can choose Christ or Hitler, as long as one follows them authentically. According to this view, then, Heidegger’s politics, if he has any, is purely formal, descriptive, and structural and does not say anything about normative contents or goals. As decisionism, it makes people vulnerable towards any kind of politics or ethics as long as the structure of the engagement is right. There is a kernel of truth in this view, too. In Being and Time, Heidegger does not present his normative criteria clearly, even though they are there. The reason for this is precisely in the methodology of the book. It is conceived as fundamental ontology which is supposed to be the pure description of phenomenological structures. Even more generally it is true that Heidegger never presents an ethics of the familiar kind. Again the reason is simple. Traditionally ethics concerns the rights, duties and practices of an individual, what she should do or must not do (in terms of utility, duties, virtues, etc.). According to Heidegger such ethics is firmly embedded in 72

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the metaphysics of subjectivity and is therefore only a secondary effect of a more primordial level of human being. Discussing individual choices and the rational grounds for them does not, according to Heidegger, grasp human existence in the right way, but rather functions by obscuring and helping to forget the essentially historical nature of Dasein. At the most, in Being and Time Heidegger gives some indications of what could be called the origin of ethics, of where and how ethics under certain circumstances can be born. Like Žižek, one may surmise that by following Heidegger’s vision we are led into a night where all cats are black—by concentrating on the history of Being and the phenomenological structures of human existence philosophy loses all of its powers of making ethical distinctions. In Žižek’s criticism of Heidegger the overall story is that Heidegger tries to defend himself after the war by building a big enough pile of bodies into which his own body, the National Socialist genocide, is lost as one more drop in the bucket. The real villain of the story would then be the forgetting of Being in all of Western philosophy and culture. Unfortunately, this critique—in both its decisionist and Žižekian forms— overlooks the fact that Heidegger does in fact put forward ethical and political ideas that concern content, directions and goals. This is the case already in Being and Time, and the tendency only increases through the years. Despite the fact that Being and Time understands itself as a purely formal description of ontological structures, it does provide particular contentful guidelines. In a way that is highly symptomatic, even though easy to dismiss, the normative guidelines have been encoded into the language of the book. While Heidegger says that he is doing fundamental ontology as phenomenological description, he uses words like fallenness, fate and authenticity, loading them to the brim with suggestive power. Partly this is a mistake, partly not. In any case it tells of an uncontrollable need of providing normative content. More importantly, all of Heidegger’s philosophy is based on the demand that thinking must not be abstract, intellectualist, merely cognitive, but rather must have a nourishing and inalienable relation with life, with experience and action. In Being and Time the demand is expressed by saying that “existential analytics” must be ontically (not ontologically!) grounded and rooted (§4). In terms of Dasein, this means that becoming authentic is an existenziell (not existential!) modification of the das Man structure (§27). Becoming authentic happens by living in a certain way, not through thinking right and not in the mind at all. Heidegger always insists that philosophy not only starts from life and experience (or, as in Husserl, from phenomena themselves) but also returns there (this is Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl)—philosophy and thinking are there in order to modify life on an ontical level. In the 1930’s Heidegger wants to connect higher education in general and philosophy in particular to work and to the life of the worker, to actual physical labour. In the National Socialist revolution, he sees much more than the victory of one party over the others: here is a true overhaul of the German life in total.8 Heidegger sees the National Socialist revolution as a process where German Dasein becomes authentic, philosophy becomes rooted and higher education gains its true 73

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place in everyday existence. True philosophy or thinking can not for Heidegger be something formal or abstract, removed from life, but must always begin and end with elementary experience and life. In view of this, it is a sign of a horrible failure by Heidegger and by his readers if Heidegger is interpreted as a purely descriptive philosopher, talking of universal phenomenological structures. With regard to Being and Time, such a misunderstanding is somewhat defensible, given that Heidegger himself still partly sees phenomenological study as the description of ahistorical structures, but after that the misreading becomes increasingly untenable. After all, the structural description in Being and Time already implies particular, contentful commitments. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology contains what Žižek elsewhere calls “false universals” (1997, 48), i.e., universals that reveal the umbilical cord that connects them with some particular non-universal content (in the same way that Heidegger thinks that naive natural science and philosophy reveal the umbilical cords that connect them to a presupposed subject-object distinction). For instance, what Being and Time says about “idle talk” is directly connected to the way in which Heidegger uses language to destroy (§6, Destruktion) old traditions and construct new ones. Likewise, the main theme, the question of Being and the forgetting of Being, are tightly linked with the quest for a new god. Why should one be bothered with the meaning of Being (Sinn des Seins) in the first place, if philosophy was a practice of formal description? The liberal, freischwebende, enlightened and rational individual with nothing bigger than herself either above or below is for Heidegger something distasteful if not evil, even though she at the same time is an “ontologically neutral” consequence of Being as “will to power” as anticipated by Nietzsche and described by Jünger. After letting go of the ideal of descriptive phenomenology in fundamental ontology, Heidegger also allows the umbilical cord better visibility, even though he never uses the registers of traditional political philosophy. Contrary to a rather widespread received view, Heidegger presents several very precise and concrete ethical claims, even something that could be called lifestyle advice. It is often remembered that in the text “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?” (GA13) that is originally a speech for German radio, Heidegger explains why he turned down an invitation for a professorship in Berlin: the Alemannian-Schwabian homeland is necessary for his work. He mentions the silent shake of the head by an old farmer’s wife after he had told of the invitation. Here we already have a fairly precise definition of the homeland from which Heidegger sees his thinking emanating. He speaks of fir trees, hawks and of the seasons.9 But how many remember that Heidegger also says that a television antenna on an Alemannian-Schwabian house is a sign that no-one is at home?10 One can not hope for a more concrete and precise expression: the limit of acceptable technology is here, in a television antenna. Naturally Heidegger sees in the motorisation of Wehrmacht a metaphysical truth, especially evident in the campaign against France (Faye 2009, 271; again we must remember that Heidegger listens to both connotations of the term “metaphysical”: the motorisation is something beyond good and evil, something in which portents of the future may be discerned). In this 74

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way the television antenna, too, is a sign of something metaphysical, a sign of notbeing-at-home, rather than a consequence of a simple consumer decision. In short: it is possible to interpret Heidegger as a purely structural phenomenologist, but the interpretation is not good enough even as a caricature. Another angle on the issue can be presented by analysing the argument according to which Heidegger could be or even should be a decisionist because decisionism and existentialism are closely related. This is because existentialism in its emphasis on existence over essence removes all non-human ground for meaning. The source of meaning is in human decisions or engagements that we are, in Sartre’s words, condemned to freely choose. Wolin (1990, 38) cites Leo Strauss: “Existentialism appears in a great variety of guises but one will not be far wide of the mark if one defines it […] as the view according to which all principles of understanding and action are historical, i.e., have no other ground than groundless human decision”. As Wolin points out, Strauss hits the spot by highlighting how existentialism sees humans thrown in a meaningless world in which they must create whatever meaning they can in whatever amount that they can. As noted above, this is a feature of finitude that both Heidegger and Žižek embrace: there are no guarantees for meaning in human existence. But at the same time the quote from Strauss reveals why Heidegger is neither a decisionist nor an existentialist.11 According to Heidegger, the forms of understanding and action available to humans are historical, but that does not mean that they would be exclusively dependent on human decisions or actions, not even if we understand humanity in the wider sense as Dasein. The historical nature of human experience, its Being-historical nature, means for Heidegger that it is partly determined by the participation of something non-human, be it Being or nothingness, demons or gods. Humans alone—especially not humans as selves, egos, subjects, consciousnesses, but not even as Dasein—do not create human meaning. Maybe it should be emphasised that this limitation is not only because humans are thrown into a world of meaning that is always already there before they are born (or, as Žižek would put it, because the subject is born when it is violently inserted into a pre-existing symbolic sphere). That is, the limitation is not only because all human meaning, all authenticity and inauthenticity comes from a tradition, from owning a situation and repeating a tradition, as Being and Time puts it. In principle all of that tradition could originate from humanity. However, that is not the case for Heidegger. For him, a much more strict limitation to purely human endeavours in creating meaning is placed by the fact that humans are as they are partly because of their non-human destinies, i.e., partly through the historical changes in Being itself. Human meaning has non-human origins. One consequence of this can be seen in the comparison with Sartre. For Sartre, the limitless freedom of existence means limitless responsibility. Not so for Heidegger, for whom the non-human origin also bears a part of the responsibility for Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Because humans do not decide over or make up all of history, they are not culpable for all that happens in it, either. Likewise, if a great thinker is at the origins of an unconcealment of Being, then the thinker stands in extraordinary danger of error… 75

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The non-human element in the history of Being also explains the seeming contradiction between destiny and choosing a hero. Why does the authenticity of Dasein need resoluteness, if authenticity is a matter of collective destiny? Precisely because the historical and processual unconcealment of Being opens up new possibilities, new spheres of being, of existence, that for their full development need the uncovering being-there of humans. However, Dasein may pull away, it may fall, it may fail to reach its essence (Wesen) as an opening for truth, it may be pulled away by habit and convenience, or pushed away by anxiety and to deinon. Against this “gravitational” field of fallenness, Dasein needs resoluteness, the persistence of standing in the constant struggle that is Being. So the theme of resoluteness found in Being and Time is in the 1930’s transformed into a call for the Germans to rise to the challenge of their historical task and destiny, to will themselves through the National Socialist revolution. The later, more elegiac Heidegger transforms the same theme further into a description of how the Grand Unconcealers of Being like Heraclitus and Hölderlin are torn and devastated by the lightning messages that they receive from inhuman Gods. The basic relationship between Being and Dasein that Heidegger describes since Being and Time and that he keeps developing throughout his career can be crudely described in the following way. Dasein hovers or floats over Being=Nothingness, over a groundless ground, as a being for which its own existence is at issue. The “hovering” or “floating” is by necessity a misleading metaphor, since Being itself needs Dasein in order to be unconcealed, and therefore it is not a separate ocean on which the tiny cork of Dasein moves up and down. In fact, it is best to understand Dasein as action and not as a being: Dasein is something that happens. In Being and Time, in his fundamental ontology, Heidegger tries to analyse how Dasein does what it does. Furthermore, Being itself is not a being, it is not a subject, agent or actor (simply because Being itself is not at all). In order to highlight this and to circumvent some of the terminological problems, Heidegger later on expresses the idea by saying that “es Ereignet”, “it takes place”, in a process where there is no “it”. Dasein is a process of unconcealment in which Being-Nothingness takes part and through which the world is revealed. If the process that is Dasein happens in a different way, the world is in a different way. Because Dasein is a place or clearing where truth may happen, Dasein may be authentic or inauthentic. Dasein is authentic when it is in a way that lets time—especially in the sense of Dasein’s own mortality—happen. Dasein is not human through and through. Rather, Dasein is influenced by something non-human, there is an influx from Being=Nothingness. This influence or inspiration can be detected as godly or demonic (for instance, in the Führer), and its presence gives the basic attunement (Grundstimmung) of to deinon. Dasein exists as various historical ways of life, habits, practices, languages and thoughts that contain various understandings of Being and consequently various epistemological and ontological accounts. Heidegger is particularly worried over the modern technological understanding of Being in which everything, including human existence, is understood as separate entities to be utilised for a purpose. 76

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This understanding of existence as the existence of an individual is based on the separation between subject and object, i.e. on the metaphysics of subjectivity. Here, human life is “produced”, as Foucault would put it, as subjects. However, ways of life, ways of producing human existence may and do change over time, in history. Two things are needed for this. First, a call from Being=Nothingness, which is experienced as something divine or demonic, sometimes embodied in the work of an artist, a poet or a politician.12 Second, the resolute and anxious response of Dasein as a collective way of life, even though the call gives or has no guarantees and even though the response means owning up to mortality. Responding to the call simply means living in a different way (in the ontical sense). Through a different kind of life also the understanding of Being changes, the epistemology and ontology change, which means that, indeed, the normative ideal of “man” or humanity could be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” like Foucault rhapsodised. At the same time, Heidegger’s account is flexible enough to allow for the fact that through different ways of life and understandings of Being, human existence may well take place as stateless and nomadic. Furthermore, since living differently is dependent on a non-human call and the collective resolute response to it, it is obvious that individual decisions and choices are simply too thin and too fleeting. Living differently is a participatory effort, including the participation of something non-human. In sum, Heidegger is not a decisionist. Rather, he derives his thinking from particular if not even unique (Einzelne) experiences. In contrast, it is interesting to analyse whether the critique of “pure form without particular content” is apt with regard to Žižek’s theory. Like already noted several times, according to Žižek himself the special feature of his theory is its account of the subject. The account of the subject, in turn, is special in that it does not see the subject as a collection of capacities, traits, or indeed as any kind of particular substance, but rather as a structural feature of the symbolic universe. This notion of the universal subject gives Žižek the possibility of overcoming both Heideggerianism and postmodernism which in Žižek’s eyes are stuck in a naive reliance on local and temporal critiques, demanding the recognition for this or that particular voice or concern without a route towards genuine generality. But what kind of social or political pressure can such an universal structural feature exert? Or, in other words, what makes such universality leftist, if the revolutionary step is to be taken but in a different direction than Heidegger’s? Simply put: nothing. Accordingly, Žižek (2003a) is able to characterise the universal subjectivity through Christianity. The universal community of Christians forms the City of God on earth, like the community of communists forms an universal and egalitarian collectivity. But we saw already above that universal subjectivity cut loose from all particular substance and identity can also be given a Nietzschean interpretation, a rightwing twist, as a call to constant overcoming of all attachments and identities. The minimalist subject as an universal structure is at the same time Lacanian, Christian, Nietzschean, with no particularly leftist or revolutionary orientation. For Žižek, 77

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overcoming one’s attachments and particular identity would mean becoming mature, more adult, becoming psychoanalytically aware of the lures of the Big Other, which entails the sublimation of all the things that tie us to ignorance, Mother Earth and immaturity. Does Žižek not, in fact, see in philosophy and the critique of ideology infinite tasks like those described by Husserl with regard to mathematics and logic? Of course, Žižek admits to all of this. In First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009) he predicts a new rise for communism, after the “end of history” and liberal capitalism of the 1990’s hit the twin rocks of the financial crisis and ecological catastrophes. He does not buy the vulgar Marxist determinism, according to which the march of history causally leads to revolution and says that such a determinism is in danger of becoming a new Big Other. In contrast, Žižek insists that me must admit that at the moment we can be saved only by “pure voluntarism”, i.e., by our free decision to act against the drift of history. This is, according to him, also the lesson to be learned from Lenin. In Russia, the situation was not “objectively” mature enough for revolution, but Lenin proved that a revolutionary act can intervene in history so that something “objectively” impossible becomes possible (2009, 154-155). In other words, for Žižek, revolutionary though is dependent on voluntarism or decisionism, the proof for which is changing a non-revolutionary situation into a revolutionary one. And does not this kind of decisionism mean in Žižek also that despite its terrible consequences, the October revolution had to be done, because it opened a new revolutionary space in the symbolic order? Here we see that the strict antiutilitarianism of decisionism, its violent disregard to all consequences, is a part of Žižek’s theory. Žižek, unlike Heidegger, is a voluntarist and a decisionist. In a sense this is a direct result of Žižek’s formal concept of the subject: when the cornerstone of the theory is purely formal, it is very difficult if not impossible to say anything substantive about the decisions, either. (Compare the strict formality of the Kantian categorical imperative). Žižek (2007a, 9-16) uses a touch of the accusation of decisionism together with the “small man in turbulent times” critique while comparing “case Heidegger” with “case Foucault”. Žižek speaks of the error of mistaking something that looks like a revolution for a genuine revolution—something that is especially alluring to intellectuals aspiring to take part in something great. Foucault was in Iran in 1979 as a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, and wrote a couple of relatively exited reports. The revolution was a two-edged affair. On one hand, old authoritarian structures were broken and democratic and economic equality increased. On the other hand, the religious aspect of the revolution meant restrictions on religious freedom and on women, restrictions that at least for Western eyes seemed negative. The question is, then, how could Foucault have thought that the Islamic revolution was something positive and how could he give his voice to a revolution in which the Ayatollahs assumed power. One possible answer is that like Heidegger before him, he became intoxicated with the idea of revolution, and lost sight of the real consequences. In both cases there is some truth in the answer. But that is not all. Žižek thinks that there was a genuine aspect of liberation in the 78

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Iranian revolution. Likewise, it can be claimed that the German revolution of 1933 also contained a genuine revolutionary side, one that is clearly identifiable from the substantive angle that Heidegger supported, developed and helped to realise. THE FRENCH CRITIQUES: TOO LITTLE POSTMODERNISM

The view on Heidegger’s Nazism that Jacques Derrida presents in Of Spirit (1989) is, in general, contrary to that presented in the liberal criticism, according to which Heidegger was during the decisive moments too postmodern because he had abandoned universal reason. Derrida thinks the opposite: on the whole and in general Heidegger was a good postmodernist, who did not aspire towards gaining a total explanation of the world or an overarching theory of everything, not to speak of working for the kind of political universalism portrayed by Enlightenment ideals. However, unfortunately Heidegger briefly fell back to metaphysical thinking during the 1930’s before re-emerging even more postmodern after the war (here Derrida is close to the view keen on the ecological mystical-green Heidegger). Derrida’s main argument is that Heidegger uses one of the main concepts of the German metaphysical tradition, that of spirit (Geist), always inside quotation marks. Heidegger wants to point to the direction, but as a Dasein philosopher he can not—so thinks Derrida— use the concept of spirit any more than the concept of the separate individual. Rather, Heidegger is very critical of both “spirit” and “people” and sees them as parts of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Uncritically used, the concepts are every bit as tainted with the circle of subjectivity as the concept of subject itself; they are some kind of meta- or super-subjects. But then, as Derrida points out, suddenly during the 1930’s Geist appears in Heidegger’s (political) texts without the quotation marks. Derrida sees here a lapse of critical postmodern thought, a fall back into a metaphysical supposition that the German spirit as a subject or actor would really exist and be capable of re-emerging as a world-historical force. Derrida does not mention Heidegger’s seminar on Hegel, discussed above, probably because he did not know of it, but Heidegger’s claim that Hegel is really born in 1933 would certainly have given more weight to Derrida’s argument. Derrida’s view contains the idea—also found in other French critiques, such as those by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in Le mythe nazi (1991)— that Nazism is fundamentally metaphysical, because it presupposes the existence of objective biologically definable races and their permanent characteristics; and not only physical but even mental characteristics which thus turn out to be determinate natural facts. This idea produces severe problems for Derrida’s account, since throughout the 1930’s Heidegger criticised the kind of Nazism which understands race as a biological phenomenon, and very clearly proposed and defined his own non-biological and non-metaphysical version of Nazism. Of course there are other non-biological versions of National Socialism besides Heidegger’s, such as the one propounded by one of the most popular ideologists of the movement, Alfred Rosenberg (Heidegger’s colleague in the committee for the philosophy of law), who 79

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presented his views in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. For Rosenberg, “the soul is the inner form of race and race the outer shell of soul” and, accordingly, “[a]ll the values of man have to be determined by the race-soul and its organic order” (1940, 2). For Rosenberg, race means the totality of an individual’s inner and outer being, her or his way of life, the relationship between will and reason. Rosenberg writes (1940, 116-117) that the life of a race or a people can not be captured by a logical system or described as evolution according to causal laws of nature. Rather, it is a matter of a mystical synthesis, the inner renewal of human life, the movements of soul—when the soul is not cut separate from the body. Whatever Rosenberg’s views are, they are hardly dependent on objective biological categories. However, due to some clumsy formulations, maybe Rosenberg’s views can be interpreted as some kind of non-materialist metaphysics. Even though he does not rely on biology or natural science, in general, maybe Rosenberg indeed posits race as some kind of mystical super-subject whose actions are discernible in the longue duree of history. But was Heidegger’s Geist a metaphysical super-subject? It is unlikely that the mere omission of quotation marks is indicative of such an error, especially because Heidegger never tires of emphasising how the spirit and the people are characterised by an inner and essential struggle and by historicity (instead of more traditional notions of permanence and well-defined identifiability). If one had to determine whether National Socialism as a whole was a “postmodern” or “modern”, metaphysical or anti-metaphysical (or even ametaphysical) political movement, one would have to enter into long and complex analyses. Like the French theoreticians mentioned above claim, many forms of Nazism contained a biologist and therefore metaphysical belief in race as a world-historical agency. On the other hand, even official Nazi state propaganda softened this biologism by a dose of idealism, emphasising the spiritual over the physical, and not all of this idealism was metaphysical. According to the official ideology, one of the main offences of “International Jewry” was its materialism that oppressed German spirituality. At the same time we have Nazis like Heidegger, who saw the National Socialist movement as a possibility for national authenticity and rebirth, for growing the roots of collective being into the ground soil of a non-metaphysical understanding of Being as essential struggle. In the same way, Nazism contained certain features of both capitalism and anti-capitalism. The Nazis left private ownership of the means of production mainly in peace, as long as the factories kept producing what the state wanted. The state guaranteed the flow of cheap labour and a rising demand for the goods, while the capitalists provided the production. Nazism meant industrialisation, technologisation, mechanisation, motorisation—like Heidegger himself observes. At the same time, it also meant an “irrational” opposition to cosmopolitanism, globalisation and even natural science in favour of Aryan or national (völkisch) science. Ideological goals like the genocide of the Jews could even disturb the war effort. National Socialism also contained obvious socialist elements, like economic planning, state support for vacations and other recreation for the workers, social employment policies and a partial dismantling of division of labour. Agricultural 80

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land was nationalised and the political power of the financial elite limited. What about Nazi aesthetics, then? Classicism, expressionism, futurism, mass spectacles re-appropriated from the Marxist labour movements—everything combined. A good example are the movies by the celebrated and hated director Leni Riefenstahl, in whose work interpreters have seen signs both of a reactionary cult of the blonde beast and of a feminist sensibility for bodily being. It is not easy to see what National Socialism stood for—modernism, postmodernism or anti-modernism—, it contains features of many different -isms at cross purposes. In any case, it is possible to argue that Nazism as a whole was metaphysical, even though such an argument is bound to be somewhat one-sided and will have to omit important features and wings of the movement. In the argument, one has to give extra weight to the biological raciology in vulgar Nazism, to the idea of race as a subject and to the organisation of all public life in terms of total mobilisation. At the same time, one has to downplay the role of non-materialist elements in racial thinking (race as spiritual, lived and experienced system of values), anti-scientific attitudes (Aryan science), the irrationality of the race-subject (will to destruction, including self-destruction) and the unsystematic nature of the state apparatus (the value given to party comradeship rather than to substantive qualifications when filling state posts, the establishing of competing organisations for the same task, reliance on intuitive leadership, and so on). Maybe the liberal critiques, like the one presented by Wolin, do after all have a stronger case when they point out that as a whole Nazism was hopelessly irrational and impossible, having abandoned not only individual freedom but also objective natural science, and having placed spiritual values and the race-soul at the basis of economic life. At the very least, it must be observed that in order to portray Nazism as metaphysical, as a totality of some kind of fixed rationality, one has to be speaking of a rationality very different from the universal reason of Enlightenment. Whatever the case may be with regard to Nazism in general, it is possible to think that Heidegger’s Nazism was a lapse into metaphysics only if one does not read or understand what Heidegger himself says of his Nazism. For Heidegger, the core of the National Socialist movement is the firm denial of all biological and other metaphysically determined foundations, and an embrace of the anxietyfilled groundless ground over which the struggle that is human collective existence historically unfolds. This is also, for Heidegger, the political uniqueness of the Nazi movement, because it based its views on a rooted and engaged collectivity organised through leadership and rank, and not on a free-floating individual. Pylkkö (1998, 258) points out aptly that Geist shakes the quotation marks from around itself since previously it had been understood as a thing or as an essence, in terms of the philosophies of value, aesthetics and practice that Heidegger despised, whereas the National Socialist revolution gave the possibility for a polemical and open reading of Geist. For Heidegger, National Socialism was post- or anti-modernism, rather than modernism. Modernism in its purest forms was represented by Bolshevism and Americanism, by the collectivist and individualist extremes of subjectivism. Like Pylkkö (1998, 250-251) concludes, the French interpreters like Lacoue-Labarthe 81

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manage to portray their own shallow understanding and a certain conceptual bravado, rather than a firm grasp of Nazism and Heidegger. Also Derrida’s account on Heidegger’s Nazism is uncharacteristically short-sighted and self-congratulatory. Naturally, Derrida thinks that tolerance, openness and plurality are closely related to the kind of postmodern deconstruction that he advocates, but in order to read Heidegger as an ally in this advocacy one has to practice considerable deafness towards all that Heidegger has to say against democracy and equality. NAZISM AS ANTICOMMUNISM

Of a type of its own is the apology presented by the historian Ernst Nolte (1998), according to which the Nazism of Heidegger and of many other distinguished individuals in the 1930’s was a correct and even in hindsight reasonable reaction against communism. Because communism turned out to be even more destructive and murderous than Nazism and because real world socialism ended in the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-communism has been vindicated. After the First World War, the danger of Bolshevism was real in Europe, in general, and in Germany, in particular, and National Socialism was the only hegemonic and powerful enough alternative to communism. Therefore support for Nazism was by no means a mistake. It was completely reasonable and even laudable. Nolte’s apology is connected to the idea that an ordinary German or even a dyed-in-wool Nazi could not have known in the early days of the revolution that the result will be genocidal. Anticommunism was a big part of the allure of Nazism for many, maybe even the biggest. For instance, in Finland Nazi sympathisers regularly pointed out the danger of communism. In Germany, the Catholic circles, among which Heidegger had grown up and into which his nearest relatives and Meßkirch acquaintances mostly still belonged, were drawn into Nazism—either as active participants or as passive onlookers—by using the Red Scare. There are also several anticommunist comments by Heidegger himself. Of special interest is his analysis of Lenin’s motto “socialism = the power of the soviets + electrification”. According to Heidegger, the plus sign in this equation is not indicative of simple adding up, but signifies Lenin’s essential understanding of socialism as the kind of soviet power that is thoroughly penetrated by electrification, i.e., by technological manipulation (GA90, 230-231). In Heidegger’s view, the essence of soviet power is a technological understanding of Being. It is easy to imagine how distasteful Heidegger may have found the attempt to scientifically plan and create a new “socialist human being”.13 Herbert Marcuse must be given credit for his rare and famous attempt to take his former teacher Heidegger to task, by directly asking why Heidegger did not after the war explain and apologise for his Nazism. In their meeting in Todtnauberg after the war, Heidegger had kept to his standard story and told Marcuse that he started distancing himself from Nazism in 1934. In a letter inspired by the meeting,14 Marcuse insists that this is not enough since because of 1933 Heidegger is still known as an active Nazi, and he has not publicly renounced his actions. Furthermore, Marcuse 82

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points out, in view of Heidegger’s own views his politics and his philosophy can not be separated from each other. In his reply15 Heidegger notes that in addition to rejuvenating German spiritual life and solving social problems Heidegger expected Nazism to save Europe from communism. Here, as in other Heidegger’s explanations and replies (that he took distance, that the Allies treated East-Germans like the Nazis treated the Jews,16 that he can not publicly renounce Nazism since that would put him in the same group as opportunists) we find a grain of truth. Heidegger really believed that Western, Greek-German thought and life had to be saved from communism. In his reply to Heidegger’s reply, Marcuse observes cleverly that saving the West from communism presupposes that communism is not Western.17 The observation cuts through Heidegger’s effort to see in the West and in Greco-German Europeanness only those features that happen to fit with his ideals.18 At its most blind, Heidegger’s partisan and non-neutral truth is created through artificial purification. In any case, in his letter to Marcuse, Heidegger himself indicates that anticommunism was only one of his reasons for supporting National Socialism. So when it comes to Heidegger, at least, Nolte’s apology is only half-baked. Heidegger is not principally an anticommunist but an anti-modernist and opposes liberal individualism at least as fervently as communism. Indeed, he sees these two as branches of the same trunk. The analysis of Lenin’s motto discussed above continues by Heidegger’s observation that all democratic, Fascist, Bolshevik states and their various mixed forms, too, are only fronts for one and the same: the total mobilisation ordered by a technological understanding of Being (GA90, 231). If the desire for individual freedom, human rights and a higher standard of living were reasons for taking down the Berlin Wall, the matter gets no hurrahs from Heidegger. The case is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that Heidegger always thought that he was defending the Western tradition, which meant opposing Russian Asiatic influence. But Bolshevism was not for Heidegger a form of the Asiatic, nor of the Jewish or the Russian (in genuine non-Bolshevist Russia Heidegger saw a possibility for new spirituality), but rather of the wrong kind of Europeanness and of the West.19 Indeed, Heidegger saw in Bolshevism something akin to Žižek’s account of Christianity as an universalist attempt to transform man (GA65, 54). For Heidegger, true Europeanness and the West mean something quite far removed from individualism, representational democracy, economic growth and human rights. Nolte can not claim that as an anticommunist, Heidegger or Nazism would have stood up for individual liberty. Even harder would be the claim that the kind of Greco-German ideals that Heidegger supported have actually won in Europe after the fall of the Wall. If Heidegger though that the result of the Second World War decided nothing, then the importance of the fall of the Wall was even less. NAZISM AS ASUBJECTIVE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE

The description of Heidegger’s Nazism by Pylkkö (1998) succeeds in being as close as possible to Heidegger’s own self-understanding. According to Pylkkö, 83

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Nazism as a revolution is an asubjective national (völkisch) experience of the kind that Heidegger was looking for in order to help the Greco-German spiritual life to be reborn. The National Socialist movement promises a New Europe out of a new collective experience as struggle, so Heidegger can not but take part. Here “asubjective” means the dissolution of the rational and utilitarian individual into a more collective experiential whole, akin to the one Heidegger denoted with the concept of Volk in Being and Time. Also some kind of religious movement might have fulfilled Heidegger’s desiderata for a new beginning, but like Nazism it would have had to be quite special; for instance, not overtly theist. In any case, the aim of the National Socialist movement to completely rearrange social and political life and to base it on an anti-bourgeois ground in terms of a struggle for authentic national being, fitted perfectly with Heidegger’s ideas. Nazism promised and also delivered an awakening of asubjective collective experience, the rejuvenation of national unity and a change—from the inside out—in the shared set of values. Faye (2009, 132-41) describes the loss of individual will, the dissolution of the individual in national experience induced by Eros, and the unification of the will of the people and the will of the Führer, as something “occult” and as “possession”. Because Faye is a rationalist, he can not discuss phenomena like this in any other way than by using pre-theoretical notions that refer to occurrences that, according to his own theory of human being, do not really exist. The occult is, strictly speaking, outside civilisation, philosophy and rational communication. By using the resources of a more experiential philosophy, Pylkkö can characterise the same phenomena as asubjective and can analyse them as a real and effective part of life as it exists in any kind of revolutionary situation. From this point of view, Heidegger’s resolute denial of presenting an apology after the war is coherent and honest, even though his post-war conduct also contains a rather crude and partly dishonest attempt to cover up the closeness between his own thinking and certain forms of Nazi ideology, and his own political activism. The cover-up operation is motivated by the great esteem—very near hubris— that Heidegger gave to his own thinking, while the honesty is motivated by that thinking itself: National Socialism really contained an “inner truth and greatness”, the potential for a Being-historical renewal of (at least) Europe. This is something that Heidegger never denies or soft-pedals, quite the contrary. The movement had the possibility for a short while, and for a moment it was on the way in the right direction, the direction to which Heidegger amongst others was pointing it to. However, eventually the movement was straddled with inner problems and was finally crushed by enemies that were stronger. Even under pressure, Heidegger never repented and apologised for himself or for his comrades. A very short and formal note from Heidegger (“Nazism was wrong, the genocide was evil, and I regret my participation in the Party”) would have saved him a lot of trouble and cleared the shelves from tons of critical literature. A note like that would have given his apologists a winning argument and saved, if not all of his work, then at least works like Being and Time from any shadow of doubt. It is a sign of the intimate connection 84

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between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics that he did not take the opportunist way out, but rather made things more difficult for himself and his sympathisers by every now and then publishing texts that rubbed the Zeitgeist in the wrong way. Heidegger did not budge into public demand—and does not do so even now, when the publication of his works and posthumous papers is done in a way that takes no heed of normal criteria of academic publishing.20 It might even be said that Heidegger stays true to his revolutionary Event in the way that Alain Badiou (2004) describes. Heidegger does not even once say or do anything that could be constructed as a repudiation of the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism (innere Wahrheit und Größe, GA40, 208). Heidegger’s skill and near perfect pitch in weighing his words becomes evident when we read his post-war texts with his fidelity in mind. Imagine that you are a committed Nazi, one of Heidegger’s comrades, and you read Heidegger’s post-war publications. There is not a sentence there that would indicate that Parteigenosse Heidegger has become a turncoat, not a sentence that would make your eyebrows rise and make you suspect a betrayal. All of the post-war work by Heidegger that has been published is perfectly compatible with his Nazism. Sometimes Heidegger puts his words with such care that a liberalist hears in them something soothing while at the same time a true Nazi hears something different altogether. A classic example is the Spiegel-interview, Heidegger’s “philosophico-political testament” that is most often read as a somewhat disappointing and evasive defence. A person who wants to downplay Heidegger’s Nazism or does not believe in it at all, reads in the interview that Heidegger was disappointed with the movement, always at a distance, at most pursuing his own interests with regard to the university. A Nazi, on the other hand, reads that Heidegger disagreed on certain themes of biological racism, belonged in a wing close to the SA, and is still ready to challenge democracy on the basis of National Socialist ideals. A good example is when the interviewers ask whether Heidegger would still sign (unterschreiben) his claim in 1933 that “the Führer alone is German reality”. Heidegger replies that he would not write (schreiben) it anymore. The interlocutors are happy. The Master has changed his views, after all. But of course Heidegger would not in 1966 write that Hitler is the reality of Germany, since by that date Hitler was long dead and the revolution lost.21 He does not say that if 1933 would happen again he would not write the sentence again. For the same reason, Heidegger can say that the end result of the Second World War “decided nothing” (GA8, 71). In terms of the history of Being the war decided nothing, because Germany, the middle-point (Mitte) of Europe, lost. The result only continued the trend that had been long in power, the trend towards mechanisation, technologisation, over-individualism and forgetting of Being. The result just means that we have to continue to prepare for a new beginning, and maybe we have to wait 300 years before new green shoots of thought arise. But a genuine decision has not happened, because only a new unconcealment of Being and its focusing in the logos in the centre of the state could mean a new era in the history of Being. Such a beginning might have been possible through the German revolution, but it was not 85

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to be. However, by the same token, Germany can not fall because it has not even risen yet (Heidegger’s letter to Stadelmann in 1945, cited in Ott 1993, 16). Before the new beginning, we are just “last men” who have the sad destiny of not even being a bridge to the other shore. Pylkkö’s interpretation and Heidegger’s own self-understanding also agree in part with Žižek’s account. Heidegger really was at his best during the 1930’s and especially in 1933. The peak had two aspects. First, the 1930’s were the time during which Heidegger’s philosophical thought and his political action were uniquely aligned, when the political and philosophical horses were pulling the same cart. The philosophical and the political supported and nourished each other and made a process towards authenticity possible. Second, Heidegger’s though was at a high point. He had left behind the misguided philosophical system-building of Being and Time and had not yet pulled back from active political life towards the mystically inspired essays of the post-war period. Here, he produced an unique synthesis of revolutionary thought; unique in its philosophical depth and active commitment. The biggest problem in the work of the 1930’s is the notion that statehood is the highest for of human existence. For many non-European and in Heidegger’s eyes “stateless and history-less” groups of people the notion is bad news, and there is no clear evidence that the more “gentle” later Heidegger would have regarded the possibilities of stateless groups in any more positive light. However, Žižek has no big problems in agreeing with the notion, given that the state is a form of power that can be collectively used in destructing capitalism and building something beyond it. According to this view, the disdain of politics by the later Heidegger was partly a case of “once bitten, twice shy”, partly a matter of genuine historical change. After the fall of National Socialism, there was, for Heidegger, no political movement or phenomenon that would have contained the possibility of a new unconcealment of Being. What followed was only the intensification and deepening of the technologisation of the world. Heidegger is consistent also in thinking that the fall of the movement was partly due to weaknesses in the movement itself. The movement was not up to its historical task, but succumbed to the same kind of forgetting of Being evident in Bolshevism and Americanism. Nazism became a form of total mobilisation without the overcoming of total mobilisation. At the same time, however, the real heart of the “secret Germany” still lay dormant, waiting for its true awakening. During and after the war Heidegger reads history in a similar way: world history is the outer shell of the history of Being. Consequently, one can read messages from Being in the history of the world, albeit in rather esoteric ways: “The knowledge of original history [Ur-geschichte] is ... mythology” (GA40, 164-165). Heidegger’s politics after the war is a kind of survivalism, the protection of seeds of new thought in the face of a formidable enemy. Herein lies also the reason for a change in Heidegger’s way of working and in his pedagogy. He stops lecturing to big university audiences and withdraws from the public eye that he had grown used to in the 1930’s—of course this is partly necessitated by the Lehrvehrbot given by the denazification committee and by the unpalatable nature of the opportunities 86

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for lectures that his friends were able to arrange. In letters to his wife, Heidegger ponders the question of what kind of language and expression would be best to make his thought available, and how his thought could reach the new generation that is without good teachers (2005, 267). Heidegger decides to work in small well-prepared seminars, held in culturally fertile places with appealing natural surroundings, so that he can be face-to-face with his students. This he finds to be what the historical situation demands from the task of thinking. These somewhat reclusive methods that put quality over quantity may remind one of other contemporary attempts to form so-called intentional communities. However, Heidegger always has his eye on the bigger picture. The small communities (Zellen) are not the goal, but an intermediary step, needed in order to educate new leaders and teachers. From this perspective, Heidegger’s post-war defence that is filled with halftruths and with deception by truth seems less dishonest and opportunistic. It is often pointed out that Heidegger never apologised for his actions or condemned the genocide. However, like noted above, the core of the issue that is much less commented on is that Heidegger never says a word that is at cross purposes with the National Socialist revolution. On the contrary, he continues to publish work that is in harmony with the goals of the revolution and holds true to the “inner truth and greatness” of the movement. A people is never for Heidegger a compilation of liberal, freely choosing, rational individuals, and much less a rhizomatic de- and reterritorialising nomadic machine. For him, a people is a group that follows the same leader and shares a multi-generational and supra-individual understanding of its destiny. Heidegger also sees the essence of religious Dasein in the following of an exemplary leader. Both the activist Heidegger of the 1930’s and the post-war mystical Heidegger are elitists and anti-democrats, seeking for an overcoming of the technological understanding of Being so that the divine bolt received by the rare true poets, thinkers and politicians is able to collect a group of dedicated followers. The centre of the polis revealed in the divine, devastating flash makes possible a people through meaningful labour and resolute following. This kind of reconstruction of Heidegger’s self-understanding is the most precise description of his Nazism. It also in itself explains why so few are prepared to accept its truth. In Heidegger’s view, the revolution in 1933 was true and in the right direction. This means that we have to get rid of simplified and cartoonish views of the National Socialist revolution, and detect its deep anti-bourgeois, anti-modernist and experiential ideals. Not many are willing to do this, even though it alone makes Heidegger’s path of thinking consistent and understandable in precisely the way that he himself proposed. Žižek must be given credit for trying to incorporate as big a part of Heidegger’s self-understanding as possible. Therefore he hits closer to the target than many of Heidegger’s critics. Žižek takes in the necessity of revolution, the connection between philosophy and revolution, the relationship between state and power politics, discipline and collectivity. Maybe he even accepts some parts of the relationship between a people and its leader, the nature of work and historical destiny in forming a collective. Even so, the goals of the revolution are very different for Heidegger and Žižek. 87

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THE TYPICAL MARXIST CRITIQUE

The traditional Marxist critique of Fascism is that Fascism tries to cover up the basic social antagonism, that between classes, by propagating an artificial picture of the society as an organic whole, a shared Fatherland, the defence of which against an enemy demands that everyone does her or his best at her or his own place. The invention of an external enemy in order to avert eyes from internal struggle is a classical political trick. The Marxist critique combines this observation by noting that in the case of Fascism and Nazism the internal struggle to be covered up is class struggle, so in fact Fascism and Nazism are attempts to perpetuate capitalism. Following Olli Tammilehto (2008, 181), we could call Fascism the four-wheel-drive of Capitalism.22 When the going gets tough and profits go down and the workers get restless and hard to control, it is time for capitalism to put Fascism in gear, so that people start pulling the common cart again. As an ideology, according to this critique, Nazism is characterised by an illusion of a unified and organic body of people, where everyone has his or her place like the organs of a body and in which contradictions arise only out of misunderstandings of one’s own role. One unified nation is the ideal on the basis of which one can strive for common good with no room for egotistic greed or envy, even though the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Moreover, everyone gains in self-respect through taking part in the great destiny of the nation, not to speak of belonging to a Master race. Žižek adds another layer to the Marxist critique. According to him, the problem of Nazism is not just the obliteration of class struggle, but the idea that society is a harmonious whole. In Žižek›s own view, a society can not exist other than based on a contradiction. The class contradiction makes a society into a society, the capitalist a capitalist and the worker a worker and so on. Otherwise there would just be individuals in random connections. The basic contradiction determines the development and change in society. Therefore the ideal of a harmonious society is not only false and impossible but also violent, because it casts individuals in roles where their subjectivity can not be realised. Such an illusory harmony is for Žižek a backward step from the achievements of modernity, an illusion that on purpose makes people into scared children running away from the anxieties of civilisation. So the typical Marxist critique, like the French critique, thinks that Heidegger’s mistake was a lapse into metaphysics, into reaching for harmony where it could and should not exist, the ideal of an organic national whole, maybe even the supposition of a clean and strong super-subject called the people. Žižek uses this critique especially in The Ticklish Subject (2009c). But it can not be the whole of Žižek’s story, since according to him Heidegger was a revolutionary because he rightly derived the necessity of politics from a philosophy of finitude, from an ontology of limits that does not readily make room for unified super-subjects. Therefore Žižek has to develop his own, more sophisticated version of the Marxist critique. As such, the Marxist critique contains a lot that is true: many Nazis did indeed aim for a unified nation in order to overcome the social problems caused by class struggle. 88

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For instance, one of the founding fathers of modern Finnish philosophy, the influential intellectual Eino Kaila (1941) writes approvingly that the overcoming of the class question through an European spirit (i.e., not through the levelling and Asiatic means of Bolshevism) is the finest achievement in the Germany of the 1930’s. The 1930’s in Europe are characterised by a hegemonic struggle between communists and anticommunists, a struggle in which the anti-communists claim that the communists are reducing all questions into international class struggle and thus neglect the well-being of, for instance, the German people and the special nature of German culture. The anticommunists are brought together by their commitment to a non-communist solution to the problems of labour, by their ideal of solving economic and class contradictions through other means. In this sense Heidegger certainly was an anti-communist. He thought that Bolshevism was one of the paradigm cases of Western metaphysics, but at the same time he was worried over the unsolved labour question. For instance, while pondering over the suitable basis for future education in 1933, Heidegger reaches back in history and considers the problems that Germany was facing when the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck died in 1898. Heidegger thinks that there were four main problems. First, the lack of a leader, second, a lack of tradition transmitted by the political elite (this was the problem that Heidegger wanted to correct in the Third Reich: he wanted to create a philosophically and politically educated strong elite), third, the inability of Bismarck to notice the rise of the proletariat as a genuine phenomenon (“in sich berechtigte Erscheinung”) and his failure to bring the proletariat back under the wings of the state (Faye, 2009, 370). The fourth problem, according to Heidegger, was misconstrued and misinterpreted national goals. Bismarck saw nationality in a narrow way as patriotism, and not as a widely embedded experiential belonging. In other words, Heidegger saw the rise of the proletariat as an important political problem that had not found its solution in previous state formations, but that might be finally overcome in the National Socialist state. For Heidegger, the solution would be that the workers saw themselves as Arbeiters in the Jüngerian sense, as workers who stay close to elementary powers, are ready for anxiety and struggle, immersed in the national experience. The problem of the typical Marxist critique is that not all Nazis presuppose or aim for a unified and harmonious whole or have illusions of a pre-modern balance. Rather, they place the basic contradiction on a different level, the racial, the ethnic, the spiritual. Crudely put, from the Marxist perspective the basic contradiction that forms a society is economic, connected to the relations and modes of production and thus fundamentally material, while for a Nazi philosopher like Heidegger, the basic contradiction is ontological, Being-historical, and can be seen in the spiritual and cultural differences between different kinds of Dasein, as exemplified by the struggle between the Asiatic and the European or the existential struggle between the European middle-point of Germany and its enemies, Bolshevism and Americanism. In other words, Marxism and Nazism of the Heideggerian kind agree that society is based on struggle and is always contradictory, but they disagree on the nature of the struggle (material or spiritual) and on its position (between classes, between ontological understandings of Being).23 89

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Therefore Žižek’s developed version misses the target even worse than the typical Marxist critique. Žižek mistakenly believes that Heidegger thinks the people or nation as a harmonious, self-sufficient whole. On the contrary, Heidegger always insists that the nation is based on struggle, contradiction (Auseinandersetzung, polemos) and therefore Being a nation always contains a horrifying (to deinon) tension that promises to tear the nation apart if its resoluteness and courage fail. Heidegger is keen to note how the enemy may be hard to perceive, because the enemy is inside us, in our very roots. Of course he immediately continues that such an enemy must be eliminated, rooted out. This drive towards purification is, to wit, maybe the most metaphysical (in the pejorative sense) of Heidegger’s habits of thinking; a habit that certainly made militaristic discipline and sacrifice more palatable for him. Still, it would be wrong to claim, like Žižek does, that Heidegger sees Dasein as fundamentally or originally harmonious, non-contradictory or balanced. For Heidegger, Dasein always contains even a non-human element that makes all harmony impossible. Just a quick glance to Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus’ fragment 53 makes it impossible to think of Heidegger as a philosopher of harmony and balanced wholes. Above, we noted how Heidegger sees polemos as the root of the master-slave structure. In his interpretation of the fragment in Einführung in die Metaphysic (GA40, 66), Heidegger says in a very Žižekian vein that through polemos (translated as Auseinandersetzung) the world becomes a world. Further, he emphasises that polemos not only lets the world be but also holds it in its permanence (Ständigkeit) so that when the struggle (polemos) ceases, beings as such do not disappear but the world pulls back (GA60, 67). For Heidegger, polemos is not only the ground of human social life, but all of human worldhood, in general. However, the typical Marxist critique is right in that Heideggerian Nazism tries to mediate between the classes in a non-economic way, without changing the position of the proletariat in terms of ownership of the means of production. The workers are given a spiritual priority, as long as the stay workers and do not aspire to become bourgeois. It is doubtful whether Heidegger himself ever was very close to his ideal. His lifestyle and tastes were that of a small-town scholar, and even in his Schwarzwald cabin (his HütteDasein, as he himself calls it) he does not take part in the physical labour of the farmers or the foresters, joining them only for free-time activities and festivities.24 Despite this, there is a certain coherence to Heidegger’s ideal, a coherence which can be imagined to be realised, the failures of Heidegger and the Nazi movement notwithstanding. One important detail in the Marxist critique concerns the relationship between Nazism and capitalism: was Nazism just a servant of capitalism? Žižek seems to indicate so in his provocative claim that Hitler was not violent enough: […] the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not “essential” enough. Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). (2007a, 39) 90

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Like discussed above, for Heidegger Jews and Jewishness were not an external enemy, but rather something to be found in the root of one’s own existence. Here the Marxists like Žižek and Nazis like Heidegger speak past each other because the basic contradiction is placed in a different location. However, again, in order to definitively judge whether in the 1930’s the German economy was an extreme form of capitalism, we would have to engage in complex analysis and evaluation of historical facts. The first thing to be noted is that the evidence points in several contradictory directions. The Nazi economy is not easy to locate on the left-right axis. For many, the alleviation of social inequality was an important reason to root for Nazism; Heidegger was one of them as he tells in the Spiegel interview (1976, 196). It is obvious that the Nazis forbade independent labour unions (and competing labour or workers parties). It is also obvious that many big companies and corporations flourished under Nazism and that many important capitalists supported it. But it is equally obvious that the influence and power of international finance was dramatically weakened and the living standard of workers—especially workers in the agricultural sector—rose. The private sector shrunk relative to the public. The operations of many sectors of industry were controlled and planned by the state. The prices of basic goods were set by the state. When Time magazine chose Hitler “The Man of the Year” in 1938, it wrote, among other things (January 2., 1939): Most cruel joke of all, however, has been played by Hitler & Co. on those German capitalists and small businessmen who once backed National Socialism as a means of saving Germany’s bourgeois economic structure from radicalism. The Nazi credo that the individual belongs to the state also applies to business. Some businesses have been confiscated outright, on other what amounts to a capital tax has been levied. Profits have been strictly controlled. Some idea of the increasing Governmental control and interference in business could be deduced from the fact that 80% of all building and 50% of all industrial orders in Germany originated last year with the Government. Hard-pressed for food-stuffs as well as funds, the Nazi regime has taken over large estates and in many instances collectivized agriculture, a procedure fundamentally similar to Russian Communism.25 One of the most anti-capitalist features was a statutory limit on profits for shareholders. In agriculture, the Nazis instituted the system of Erbhofs, hereditary farms that were legally res extra commercium, outside the market (could not be sold or used as collateral when applying for a loan). These farms did not have owners, but care-takers, whose job it was to transmit them to the next generation. The idea was connected to the ideal of Aryan land, and an Erbhof could not be owned by a non-Aryan. Like Žižek (2007a) himself notes, the Nazi economy contained many socialist features, from the Kraft durch Freude program to forced nationalisation.

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But Žižek is right in that the economy, the capitalist structures and class relations were not a political priority for the Nazis. For the official Nazi Party line, the economy is secondary to spiritual questions. The economy is left alone, as long as it functions inside the parameters set by the Party. Structurally, the closest analogy to the National Socialist economy may be found in contemporary China, where the state takes care of certain strategic areas of production and provides strict limits and rich incentives for the markets, and inside the limits capitalist markets may do what they please while the state guarantees stability and willing workers. At the same time, the Party-State has a certain responsibility to take care of the nation and its greatness. Žižek (2009d) calls this model in its contemporary forms “authoritarian capitalism”. However, in distinction to China and the liberal or authoritarian capitalisms, the Nazis saw the economy as subservient to other needs. Hitler and Heidegger agree in thinking that once one takes care of the national (spiritual) awakening, the economy will take care of itself; the economy is a secondary after effect of the national experience (GA16, 281; see also Tooze 2006, Pylkkö 1998). As is well known, many of the flagship projects of the Nazi economy, such as the Volkswagen Beetle, did not come to fruition. Only the industries related to warfare and the military were constantly on target. Žižek’s description of Hitler is true in that Hitler has been described a “weak dictator”, stalling and putting off important decisions. Often he ended up with different kinds of pseudo-solutions, like for instance making several overlapping and partially contradictory decisions, giving the responsibility for a task to several people at once, setting up competing institutions and so on. In view of this, Safranski (1999, 268) calls the Nazi system “polycentric”. Sometimes things turned out well, sometimes the result was chaos and ressentiment. The classic case is the military wing of the Party itself. The SA and the SS competed over the privileged position. During the war, Germany was replete with internal secret police organisations: the Party, Wehrmacht, the police, and the SS all had their own. To picture the Nazi state as efficiently trimmed, lean and ruthlessly streamlined is simply wrong. The Nazi state was partially inchoate and chaotic, and partially intentionally so. Key ideologists, Hitler among them, emphasised that the best part of Nazi economic policy was that there was no policy.26 The Nazi economics had elements from economic planning and at the same time elements cutting through bureaucracy and centralisation by leadership and agile organisational structure. While discussing the Marxist critique, it is interesting to return to the Gestalt of the worker. For typical Marxist theories, the worker (proletariat) is someone who has no other possessions than his progeny (proles) and nothing to sell on the market but his labour power. The worker is fundamentally an economic category, something that exists while certain kinds of markets exist. For Heidegger, the worker is a metaphysical category, something that exists through a certain kind of understanding of Being, in a certain Being-historical situation. The worker is defined by his or her closeness to elementary powers, by discipline and readiness for sacrifice, the disdain for individual comforts, an experiential connection to the people and nation, and by organisation according to the demands of total mobilisation. Unlike the 92

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bourgeois, the Jüngerian worker does not shy away from inconvenient or hard tasks or circumstances, the worker does not “outsource” blood and horror from his life, but is present at the roots of his or her being, in the anxious and violent (to deinon) struggle of Being.27 Consequently, the worker is enlivened by elementary experiences (Erfahrungen), and does not seek for individual experiences (Erlebnis) to fill the empty consumerist life separated from the roots of existence. Clearly, for such a worker relations of ownership and other economic categories are secondary. Since this kind of worker is the metaphysical ideal, Heidegger tries to educate the students as workers by introducing the three kinds of service. The Jüngerian, Heideggerian and Marxist views agree that work and the workers are the most important characteristics of the contemporary era. The worker will make the future world with his or her hands. Likewise, all three are united in their anti-bourgeois stance, their contempt for the hypocritical culture of the bourgeois. The antagonism between the worker and the bourgeois is fundamental for Heidegger’s notion of the revolution, but not as an economic question. For Heidegger, the antagonism is between the resolute (the worker) and the evasive (bourgeois) relationship to the modern unconcealment of Being. The biggest part of the socialism in National Socialism is to be found in this anti-bourgeois stance. The bourgeois individual must find his or her inner worker and the connection to elementary forces and national experience. How is this basic antagonism visible in Heidegger’s notion of the worker and how does Heidegger’s view of the worker as a metaphysical phenomenon change over time? It is good to remember that Jünger’s Der Arbeiter is published in 1932, so both Heidegger and Jünger start thinking about the phenomenon under different names much earlier. For Jünger, the worker is preceded by the soldier of the First World War. According to him, the soldier experiences the war as an asubjective unconcealment of Being, as his individuality is lost in the storm of steel on the front. Here we also see why Heidegger for a long period gave a positive sense to the technological understanding of Being and metaphysics: as a phenomenon of total mobilisation the storm of steel, where the amount of ammunition and other military equipment is more decisive than the heroics of the individual, can provide an opening for the authenticity of Dasein. When speaking of Jünger, Heidegger (e.g., GA90, 226) mentions that Jünger was a leader of a special operations group (Stoßtruppführer) in some of biggest battles of materiel (the German word, Materialschlacht, itself seems to speak of the nature of the phenomenon) and that this experience grants Jünger access to the metaphysical area that Nietzsche called will to power. We should remember that the First World War was a direct inspiration for Heidegger’s philosophical work and that the National Socialist revolution was also a struggle over the historical meaning of the war. The maverick media theorist Friedrich Kittler (2003) has even claimed, quite interestingly, that the basic ontological categories of Being and Time are born out of the front experiences of the war. Be that as it may, Kittler is on the right track at least as far as concerns the fact that the change in the nature of war, which Jünger witnessed first as a leader of new elite troops and then as their instructor, was part of a bigger change in worldview that 93

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Heidegger was interested in. Again borrowing a concept from Jünger, Heidegger calls this phenomenon total mobilisation. In total mobilisation all material and spiritual effort, whether on the war front or on the home front, and even, most crucially, in times of peace, is directed towards victory in the war. Battles of materiel, the rush of the elite troops into the trenches while the own artillery is still shooting, the “democratisation” of the troops by bringing the weaponry and tactics of the elite troops to the whole army, motorisation—all of these speak of total mobilisation. The core of the worker is a soldier of total mobilisation, which explains why both Jünger and Heidegger think that the worker is characterised by resoluteness, courage and sacrifice—not as personal or individual traits but as emanations of the national spirit. The ground antagonism or contradiction for the worker-soldier is the question revealed during the demonic rage of battle: is the spirit capable of withstanding the anxiety, glory and abyss or does it withdraw into nihilism, for instance, into conventional religion or bourgeois conveniences. Both resolute courage and nihilist escape are essential, ontological possibilities that can not be erased. The authenticity gained through resoluteness in only possible if falling into inauthenticity is possible, too. Therefore the antagonism is essential and inalienable. And once more: the antagonism is set and released also by something bigger than human agency. Consequently, Heidegger thinks that the Marxist view that trusts in the omnipotence of economic measures is flawed and naive. Heidegger appreciates the analysis of work and the proletariat in Marxism, but sees that due to its strict economism it remains tied to the metaphysics of subjectivity and anthropocentrism. As noted above, in the Letter on Humanism (1946; GA9, 339-340) Heidegger praises Marx for having rightly perceived in alienation the metaphysical homelessness that characterises modern man. In this way, Marxism and communism operate on the correct level in terms of the history of Being, unlike, for instance, Husserlian phenomenology or Sartrean existentialism. Alienation is for Marx a consequence of a certain type of work, one that he would call capitalist and Heidegger technological. In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger emphasises that the importance of materialism is that it points out how, in the contemporary understanding of Being, everything is revealed as material for work. And from this belief—all that is, is material for work— follows homelessness. If Marxism fixes the problem of alienation through changes in the ownership of the means of production, this homelessness is left untouched: also a real communism might see all that is as material for unalienated work. In this sense socialism or communism means only a perfection of the technological understanding of Being and the accompanying homelessness. In Jünger, the description of the soldier-worker contains a futuristic element, a glint of brushed steel and gunmetal, combined in a jarring way with the antimodernist elements of black earth and green leaves. The soldier-worker is not technological in the sense that he would seek in technology a means to control nature and to make his life secure. For the soldier-worker, technology is a way in which Being is historically unconcealed, along with phenomena like death, destiny and Eros, which for Jünger, unlike for Heidegger, is always present. In this way, 94

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the soldier-worker provides a route for becoming authentic, unlike the scientifically and economically rearranged Bolshevist worker or the Taylorist worker-as-aresource in Americanism. For Heidegger, the core of the Jüngerian experience of Materialschlacht is that when Dasein recognizes that it does not control technology but technology controls it, the essence of technology can be revealed. Technology is in effect a particular unconcealment of Being and therefore in or through technology an essential experience (experience of the essence) without disturbing selves or egos is possible. An essential experience of technology has the same kind of spiritual truth as the Greek experience of Being as presence. Technology, like any truth, is at the same time that which is covered-up and that which does the covering. The fundamental experience of this fact makes possible the overcoming of technology. Heidegger understands the soldier-worker along these lines even during the Second World War, and partly after it. Consequently, he sees the National Socialist revolution as more fundamental, more metaphysical (including the motorisation of the Wehrmacht), than the October revolution. The latter concerns “only” socioeconomic structures, whilst the 1933 revolution concerns the very Being of European (Greco-German) humanity. The Bolshevist revolution is an attempt to bring the technological understanding of Being to perfection through total mobilisation, without a credible attempt at overcoming it (Aufhebung). Since the 1933 revolution according to its nature grasps human being at a more primordial, more elementary level, it is from the Heideggerian perspective only logical that also its consequences are more dire. One weakness in the typical Marxist critique is that it explains Nazism and especially its horrors too rationally. Why would the covering-up of class struggle and the continuation of capitalism mean the mass-murder of certain minorities, the genocide of the Jews and national self-destruction? Or why would all of this be the consequence of a dream of returning to a premodern harmonious state? It is pretty obvious that a realistic or naturalistic account of Nazism and its horrors must be based on a philosophical anthropology in which the will to destruction, irrational impulses, thanatos, the loss of individual accountability and immersion in collective experience are seen as basic possibilities of human being. Otherwise we end up in Faye’s conundrum where Nazism must be explained as “occultism” and “possession”. Also Žižek faces problems here. How is it possible that the National Socialist revolution, the Nazi horrors which according to Žižek are relatively easy to explain (unlike Stalinism) and the “not violent enough” Hitler are at the same time more horrible and inhuman than the October revolution and Stalinist crimes? What if the answer to this question is to be found if we do not think that Stalinism was sui generis, an inexplicable dead-end of real socialism, but rather something that was also, in part, motivated by the will to destruction, murderousness, xenophobia and an erotic identification with Stalin, causing a suspension of individual responsibility? After the war Heidegger struggled to get rid of the Nietzschean account of the history of philosophy. He did not anymore see Nietzsche as the first step over metaphysics, but as the last step perfecting it. Accordingly, he gives a new meaning 95

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to the theme of the “second beginning” (andere Anfang). It is not anymore a question of creatively re-experiencing the Greek origin of Western philosophy, a second mobilization of the beginning announced by Heraclitus. Rather, the second beginning is interpreted as the task of letting go of philosophy in favour of thinking. Like noted above, Heidegger never stops believing that the National Socialist revolution contained the possibility for a new authentic European Dasein, realised in the form of the soldier-worker. In contrast, he believes strongly that no such possibility exists in the world levelled by the technological understanding of Being. Even the Germans, the most metaphysical people of all, failed their potential and fell into the same scale with Bolshevist Russians and pragmatist Americans. It is to Heidegger’s credit that in such a hopeless situation he does not give in, but stubbornly keeps on seeking for a way out. He reinterprets the Nietzschean will to power as a form of a deeper will to will (Wille zum Willen), which as such is the cornerstone of metaphysics. Therefore thinking and the second beginning have to happen beyond willing. This theme of letting go of the will finally brings Heidegger into close proximity with Eastern traditions that have long dealt with both the theoretical issue and the practices of non-willing. Of course, Heidegger does not seek for salvation through these traditions since, for him, the problem of technology can be overcome only on the same experiential soil or ground on which it was created. Heidegger does not manage a synthesis between the overcoming of Western metaphysics and the Eastern practices of non-willing and no-self, and maybe that is as it should be. According to Gadamer (1996, 19), Heidegger’s often repeated phrase “Nietzsche hat mich kaputtgemacht” (“Nietzsche ruined me”) refers to Heidegger’s feeling that what Nietzsche left unfinished, was unfinished also after Heidegger (however, von Herrman disagrees and thinks that Heidegger simply meant that the work on Nietzsche had sapped Heidegger’s physical strength; 1996, 21). It is possible that it is left unfinished because of Nietzsche: because Heidegger believes in Nietzsche’s vision on the will to power and in its Jüngerian interpretation, his own thought on the unconcealment of Being during the last century never comes to full fruition. ŽIŽEK›S UNTYPICAL MARXIST CRITIQUE AND PRAISE

The core of Žižek’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism is that, unlike often claimed, Heidegger’s political activism was not totally wrong but rather almost right. Heidegger got the necessity of revolution right, also the form of the revolutionary act was partly right, only the concrete Nazi twist given to the form was wrong. Like Heidegger, Žižek is incorrigible. Heidegger does not apologize for his Nazism, and Žižek does not—despite all the demands for political correctness and the taboo on calls for violence—shy away from advocating a certain kind of totalitarianism, ethical violence and “good terror”, as exemplified by Robespierre in the French revolution. Like noted above, his interpretation combines several elements: the Marxist critique, the tradition of Enlightenment, Heideggerian mistrust towards Enlightenment and a postmodern view on global capitalism. Žižek is aiming at a 96

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fairly small target or for a fairly fine balance, even though (or maybe because) there is a lot at stake: an account of a revolution that would overthrow capitalism. Above all, Žižek wants to avoid the liberal stance according to which Heidegger’s Nazi period proves the rottenness of his philosophy. In the liberal view, as if the word-magic and irrationality of Heidegger’s texts were not proof enough, his Nazism drives the final nail in the coffin. In contrast to this, Žižek wants to claim that Heidegger’s though was not great despite its Nazism (like many orthodox Heideggerians claim, trying to separate his Nazi period from the rest), but because of its Nazism (2007a, 18). Žižek recognizes that for Heidegger Nazism was the only political movement that at least tried to deal with what he saw as the central problem, that of technology. In other words, for Heidegger Nazism was not one political view among others, it was politics as such. Everything else was technocratic foolishness, with representational liberal democracy leading the pack. That is why after the collapse of National Socialism Heidegger does not return to politics. That is also why Heidegger’s Nazism is not a temporary failure or passing phase, even though some of his evaluations of what the Nazis were up to or some of his ventures inside the movement might have been in error. Rather, Heidegger’s political philosophy, i.e., his Nazism, is the key to his thought in general. It is easy to agree with Žižek in this estimation. By 1933, Heidegger had left behind the systematic and ground-breaking attempt of starting philosophy anew in Being and Time, an attempt that despite its radicality was trapped in its own formalism. Being and Time is a masterwork, to be sure, but it is still an example of a whole wave of German Dasein philosophy, one that is distinguished from its peers by its Husserlian rigour. Yet to come were the beautiful, impressive and in their non-Europeanness startling essays on the critique of technology and on Gelassenheit. However, despite their apparently surprising nature, these essays are at the same time some of the least original works by Heidegger. They present inside the tradition of European philosophy and with Heidegger’s authority claims and thoughts which are very well known if not commonplace in other traditions (including European mysticism). In contrast, in the 1930’s Heidegger was at his most radical, politically and philosophically. He makes a sustained, unique and powerful attempt at creating a unified philosophicopolitical view, through which emancipation from liberalism and technology would become possible. There are not many such synthetic and practical views to begin with, much less ones thought out by erudite, conceptually creative and politically committed philosophers. Žižek is right: the true greatness of Heidegger is in his political thought. However, Žižek begins his article “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933” (2007a) with a critical point, characteristically delivered through an anecdote. The story borrowed from G.K. Chesterton tells of general Arthur St. Clare, who after a successful career is stationed with his troops in Brazil. It is known that St. Clare attacked the much larger force of the Brazilian commander Olivier, and lost. St. Clare himself was found hanged with his bent sword around his neck. In Chesterton’s story, suspicion is raised by the idea that St. Clare, who was known as a careful and 97

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skilled commander, in a clearly suicidal mission attacks Olivier. Why? As Žižek quotes from Chesterton: “Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.” It turns out that St. Clare has a dark secret. One of his subordinates guesses what the secret is and St. Clare kills him. In order to hide the body, St. Clare orders the attack. However, his troops find out about the plan and hang him. The attempt to hide one body in a pile of bodies fails. The analogy Žižek has in mind is clear. Heidegger’s habit of blaming the massmurders of the 20th century on Western technology and forgetting of Being28 is an attempt to hide the Nazi genocide in a whole flood of murders through the millennia. The “criminalization” of the whole Western history tries to hide—not only to put in proportion and thus to relativize—the responsibility of the Nazis and Heidegger himself. Žižek (2007a, 2) quotes also his German colleague Peter Sloterdijk, who criticizes leftist intellectuals for reducing Auschwitz to the mistakes of Plato or Luther. As Sloterdijk points out, the danger here is to obscure how close many leftists have been to a system that methodically murdered real or imagined “class-enemies”. The evasion behind a pile of bodies is different from the tu quoque-apology, in which one’s own crimes are relativized or made more acceptable by claiming that they were responses to previous—and more heinous—crimes by the enemy. For instance, Nolte’s apology discussed above explains Nazism as a reasonable and ultimately justified response to the threat of communism. In the same way, the Allies can try to justify Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki by referring to Nazi crimes. The speciality of the “pile of bodies”-defence is its reliance on an account of the prolonged and fateful decline in Western understanding of Being, of a historically advancing eclipse of authenticity.29 It is clear that no individual and even no revolutionary movement can be held responsible for such a persistent and long historical development. It is a sobering fact that Heidegger presents no detailed or convincing analysis of the terrible consequences of the National Socialist revolution. He states that the inner truth and greatness of the movement were never realized, but does not say why, other than by offering some observations on how the leaders of the movement were not spiritually of a high enough calibre, and on how the intellectuals were not involved enough and how the technological enemy was too powerful. He does not say anything on how the failure to realize the greatness might be connected to the genocide or to the (self-)destruction of Germany. Why, exactly, does National Socialism lead to mass-murder and genocide? Does Heidegger really think that the fact demands no other explanation than the general explanation that applies equally to Bolshevism and Americanism? Or is the explanation self-evidently contained in the idea that a national awakening contains the element of to deinon, the demonic forces that are more powerful than individuals? Is the explanation that the people needed the demonic and chthonic forces in order to break free from bourgeois liberalism, but that the liberation fell short and resulted in an ever more heedless flight towards technology after a cataclysmic collapse?

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In an uncharacteristically down-to-earth manner Žižek blames Heidegger for a too abstract strategy of defence. Through the analogy with Chesterton’s story, Žižek points out that Heidegger puts the blame for the 20th century in general on the whole of Western metaphysics in order to hide his specific crime, National Socialism. This is surprising since at his most provocative Žižek is fond of claiming that a proper theorist needs no empirical facts (and he himself does not need to watch the movies he analyses) and only “absolute theory” can reveal the truth. But now here Žižek wants us to focus on Heidegger’s particular failure, National Socialism, not as an example of the general tendency towards a forgetting of Being, but as a specific historical event with its own causes and effects, with real and irreplaceable victims. It is not entirely clear why Žižek’s insistence on the particular and historical, his emphasis on the empirical, would not turn and bite him back. For instance, in an antiauthoritarian tone one might ask does not Žižek’s own flirtation with totalitarianism and Stalinism try to hide behind a pile of bodies, when he defends the revolutionary form of the October revolution despite the very real victims of Stalinism? In the spirit of the “pile of bodies”-strategy, Žižek seems to say that even though Stalinism was bad, it was still a consequence of a promising overthrow of capitalism, and we all know that capitalism is really bad… True to form, Žižek does not stay long on these empirical and down-to-earth matters. Right away, he returns to valorising absolute philosophy that deals in “totalities”. In addition to the “pile of bodies”-defence, another relativizing strategy that exonerates philosophers is to claim that philosophers should never try their hand at politics, because they will only try to force their overarching and total theoretical views on and unyielding and rich empirical reality, thereby causing havoc and suffering. According to this view whenever an abstract philosophical view is brought to bear on reality, reality is violently put in a Procruste’s bed. Here the basic flaw of philosophy is its totality, the attempt to create a total theory of the world, since there is only one step from total to totalitarian and from an utopia to a miserably failed attempt at realizing it… Again Žižek quotes Chesterton, this time Chesterton’s ironical proposal of a philosophical police, a force consisting of philosophers and monitoring philosophers. The task of the force would be to find the thoughts that become deeds, to find and eradicate the motivating ideas and reasoned grounds for action in the work of philosophers and poets, before the ideas can be turned into action. Like Žižek (2007a, 3) notes, Chesterton’s idea is rather close to the views by Popper, Adorno and Levinas who see the philosophies of totality as the grounds for totalitarian politics. Žižek naturally rejects such a view, since it according to him relies on a premodern notion of “wisdom”. The “wise” knows that reality can not be forced into alien moulds, that subsuming everything under one truth is worse than allowing for small transgressions and deviations in the name of balance. Žižek›s (2007a, 3-4) rebuttal is that this kind of wisdom presupposes a harmony or a balance for which it, nonetheless, cannot give a non-ideological definition. The presumed harmony dictates an uncritical social structure. Against this, Žižek wants to emphasise the partial and discordant nature of truth. Žižek›s and Heidegger›s leap into unbalanced and total politics goes 99

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against the Popperian and Levinasian warnings against totalities of thinking. From the same source comes Žižek›s evaluation that the later Heidegger who withdrew into a proximity to traditions of wisdom, was the worst Heidegger. So Žižek wants to be precise in locating and identifying the Nazi mistake in Heidegger’s thinking. He uses Chesterton’s story once again. The liberalist critique works like St. Clare by putting Heidegger’s thinking in the same pile with all “Fascist thinking”, thus missing its particular mistake. So Žižek must first remove some common misconceptions: the mistake is not in thinking in terms of totalities, not in using concepts like discipline, not in the notion of truth as non-neutral, especially not in engaging in revolutionary thought and political activity. We have already discussed Žižek’s reply to the claim that Heidegger’s mistake was totalitarianism and non-neutral truth. Let us briefly look at the other misconceptions listed by Žižek. The totalitarianism shared by Žižek and Heidegger means that Žižek must defend ideas that in connection to Heidegger’s theory of the history of Being start sounding National Socialist: […] there is nothing “inherently Fascist” in the notions of de-cision, repetition, assuming one’s destiny, etc. (or, closer to “ordinary” politics, in the notions of mass discipline, sacrifice for the collective, etc.)” (2007a, 29) The mistake is not in these concepts and practices that Fascism in any case takes from the leftist labour movement: None of the ‘proto-Fascist elements is per se Fascist, what makes them ‘Fascist’ is only their specific articulation—or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms, all these elements are ‘ex-apted’ by Fascism. In other words, there is no ‘Fascism avant la lettre,’ because it is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements Fascism proper. (2007a, 30) The reason for the innocence of decisionist concepts is the same as the reason for the innocence of totalitarianism: political action is not about reaching a balance and putting forward reasonable demands, but about the truth taking place in a community (or as a community). This means partiality in the collective unity, discipline, sacrifice and so on. For Žižek, what is good in Heidegger’s revolution is not only its connection to an ontology of finitude but also its more everyday rebelliousness. One example can be Heidegger’s “cultural revolution”, his attempt to bring students, workers and soldiers together in a Maoist vein (Žižek 2007a, 3). Like noted several times already, for Heidegger Nazism was not one political doctrine among others, but rather an attempt to transform European life.30 The clearest example of the Heideggerian “cultural revolution” is the Wissenschaftslager, the point of which is to make a dangerous and unpredictable attempt at forging a new kind of student and teacher through psychological and physical education. While speaking of this cultural revolution, Žižek even admits a certain empirical closeness between Heidegger’s National Socialist revolution and the socialist 100

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revolution. A second example is Heidegger’s often repeated idea that the beginning (most often meaning the origin of Europeanness in early Antiquity) is not behind us, but always beckoning ahead of us. Žižek (2007a, 31) quotes approvingly Heidegger (GA45, 41) who in his 1937-38 lectures dismisses conservatisms as a philosophy of history, since only a true revolutionary can see into the depths of history. By the term revolution Heidegger means a creative reproduction of the first beginning so that the second beginning is “completely other but still the same [as the first beginning]”. Žižek connects this Heideggerian theme to Benjamin’s theory of revolution and to Kierkegaard’s account of repetition as “inverted memory” (Žižek 2007a, 31). Here, the repetition of historical origins is not imitation, but the bringing-forth of something hidden and unrealised in the origin, a reparation of the failure of the first beginning, at least in the sense of “failing better”. This Žižekian view is crystallised in the notion of the revolutionary act, which draws inspiration also from Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. For Žižek, politics is the art of the impossible. Authentic politics changes the existing coordinates of the possible, makes something that was impossible, possible. A revolutionary act is not possible before it is done. It must retroactively change the (symbolic) order by inserting its causes into its own past. Like Žižek notes, this sounds like time travel, since the causes come after the effect. While done, the revolutionary act is impossible, but after it has taken place, it has always already been possible. Herein lies the genuine novelty of a revolution: through a revolution something enters the world that would not have existed without it. A revolution changes history retroactively; a view also wholeheartedly embraced by Heidegger, even though expressed in different words. Second, we must note the symbolic-semiotic dimension of the revolutionary act. In Žižek’s account, the revolutionary act has two instantiations in the symbolic universe. One is the act itself, its concrete content. The other is the form of the act, an empty space that the act opens in the symbolic universe. The empty space makes possible the repetition of the act. The form of the act lives on despite what happens to the act itself. The form of the act is the Heideggerian beginning that is ahead of us, calling for a new content able to overcome the mistakes and errors of the first act. A creative re-filling of the form is repetition, not as mechanical imitation, but as a realisation of the dimensions that the first act missed (necessarily so, in the pressures of the historical moment). When Žižek writes about repeating Lenin, he does not mean a better realisation of Lenin’s (psychological) intentions, but the second coming of his non-individual revolutionary acts. For instance, against the view made famous by Fukuyama, according to which history has ended (because liberal capitalism has been proven unquestionably best), the October revolution reveals the historical possibility of another kind of socio-political reality which is not cancelled by the Stalinist endresult of the revolution but rather calls for a “better failure”. In a Heideggerian vein Žižek says that true repetition goes against the letter so that the spirit can be realised. The fidelity of the repetition is in the breaking of the letter which shows that the spirit is true. So classic thinkers and classic revolutionary acts must be interpreted in a way 101

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that finds in them a dimension that is “more Catholic than the Pope”. For instance, we have to interpret Heidegger as more Heideggerian than he himself was, Kant as more Kantian than Kant, and the October revolution as more revolutionary than itself. It is easy to detect some Platonic, Hegelian or maybe in this case Lacanian shades in Žižek’s account, shades that do not fit well with materialism or with Heideggerian phenomenology. Exactly how and exactly where is the form of the act preserved through history? How and on the basis of which criteria is a repetition of the act recognised as true repetition? We discussed above the partly untenable and un-empirical distinction that Žižek has to make between the October revolution and the 1933 revolution. Simply put, Žižek needs the symbolic level distinction between the content and the form precisely in order to make the (non-empirical) distinction between the revolutions. However, at the same time the notion of the act becomes undeniably Platonistic, and loses most of its materialist appeal. The history of philosophy is filled with such petrified, presumably non-historical notions. Why is it not enough for Žižek that acts and revolutions are always new and unique, not the repetitions of earlier revolutionary forms gestating forever in the symbolic universe? If Žižek would give up his Platonism, one consequence would be that the previously absolute distinction between the October revolution and the 1933 revolution (and the distinction between Nazi crimes and Stalinism) would collapse into a messy, untidy and hard to decipher empirical issue. Maybe it is precisely this pressure of “small distinctions” (between the National Socialist and Socialist ideas) that forces Žižek into uncharacteristic formalism and idealism. It is not hard to recognise the structural similarity in Žižek’s concepts of the subject and of the revolutionary act. Are they, in fact, identical? In both cases what is decisive is the universal and ahistorical structural form (the empty space of the act, the empty space of the subject) as a symbolic level after-effect of something that has (violently) taken place concretely, particularly. On the symbolic level, there is a structural, contentless rupture that can be named but that exists only as an empty sign or echo. The form of a revolutionary act is the empty sign for the fact that a revolutionary act has taken place and broken the symbolic order by re-establishing the limits of the possible. The subject is the empty sign for the fact that an individual must—whether she wants or not—to live in a pre-existing symbolic order in which she has no given place (no permanent, particular content as a subject). The subject is the empty sign of the act where the individual is violently thrown into the symbolic order. However, in Žižek’s theory, the empty sign has its own effectivity, because the symbolic level binds all human thought and action. The double nature of the act gives Žižek an important tool for evaluating Heidegger’s Nazism. Like Žižek writes: So, back to Heidegger—in his Nazi engagement, he was not “totally wrong”— the tragedy is that he was almost right, deploying the structure of a revolutionary act and then distorting it by giving it a Fascist twist. (2007a, 31) 102

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The (totalitarian, decisionist) form of Heidegger’s revolutionary act was correct, but the Fascist twist (content) given to it was wrong. This is Žižek’s most precise description of Heidegger’s error. Unfortunately, it is not very explicit: what do the “Fascist twist” or the “letter (the nomination)” mean, exactly? Presumably many different things: at least Žižek sees that the revolution in the Nazi revolution was not real, nothing genuinely new was born, the revolution was wrong in its antisemitism, in its pseudo-biological and ethnic identification of the enemy, in its inability to destruct capitalist forms and so on. In a word: a fake revolution. Maybe a similar twist was Stalinism that likewise perverted a true revolution. The wrong twist is according to Žižek connected to Heidegger’s wrong philosophical step after Being and Time—a step that escalated into a steady run after the war. Like noted above, Heidegger’s post-war Gelassenheit philosophy tries to dismantle the trap that Nietzsche had set. Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s will to power as a form of will to will, given concrete form in the technological understanding of Being with its uncritical subject-object division. In order to get rid of this snare, we have to get rid of the will, which results in a familiar paradox: wanting to get rid of the will is also willing. To alleviate this paradox Heidegger turns to sources of Taoism and (German) Christian mysticism, to ideas on non-willed overcoming of the will. In his article Žižek quotes Bret Davis’ work Heidegger and the Will (2007), in which Davis argues that the concept of the will can be found in all stages of Heidegger’s work and that even Gelassenheit is partly tainted by it. Žižek accepts Davis’ analysis, but disagrees on its consequences. Davis thinks that the residues of the will are a problem (leading into Nazism in the 1930’s), while for Žižek the residues are a sign of Heidegger’s partial success that he nonetheless fails to push through: Our wager is, however, that the persistence of the Will even in the latest Heidegger, so brilliantly discerned by Davis, rather demonstrates the insufficiency of Heidegger’s critical analysis of modern subjectivity—not in the sense that “Heidegger didn’t go far enough, and thus remained himself marked by subjectivity,” but in the sense that he overlooked a non-metaphysical core of modern subjectivity itself: the most fundamental dimension of the abyss of subjectivity cannot be grasped through the lenses of the notion of subjectivity as the attitude of technological domination. (2007a, 34) This is Žižek’s view of Heidegger also in the Ticklish Subject (2009c), where he emphasises Heidegger’s failure to overcome the philosophy of the subject. Of course, according to Žižek, the philosophy of the subject should not be overcome. Rather, we need to recognise the non-metaphysical and still universal core of subjectivity. This non-metaphysical and non-historical subject is the paradox that Žižek needs as a guarantee for the double-barrelled revolutionary act. The paradoxical edifice of the minimal subject is undeniably conceptually clever and partly also convincing.31 Following Davis, Žižek first separates two dimensions of willing. First, there is the will as shaped and conditioned by a particular historical 103

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moment (for instance, the subject’s technological will to power). Second, there is a non-historical original will, Ur-Wille, that is precisely the kind of will that persists as a ghost even in the middle of non-willing. Žižek claims that the second, the UrWilling, is in some way a feature of Being itself (at least of the kind of Being that contains humans that know and speak; this is Žižek’s interpretation of the way in which Heidegger “ontologises” Kant’s epistemological turn, see Žižek 2009, 26) and not a feature of historical subjectivity. As an example he uses the problem of evil. Evil can not be only the distance between man and God, because that distance can appear only if there already is in God a lack that necessitates creation, as Schelling argued (Žižek 1997). Žižek notes that also Heidegger explains subjective forgetting of Being (i.e., the technological understanding of Being experienced today) as a consequence of struggle in Being itself. In this way, the Ur-willing would be a feature of Being itself, existing before all human subjectivity and also before all transformatory Gelassenheit. Žižek and Davis find evidence for this kind of Ur-Wille in Heidegger’s interpretation of Anaximander’s fragment32 on the reparation of incoherence. Heidegger explains Anaximander’s view of how the incoherence ( δικίας) can appear by saying that the present has a tendency for “rebellious whiling” (Eigensinn des Beharrens).33 Davis and Žižek (2007a, 34-35) see this “rebellious whiling” as a phenomenon of Ur-Wille. Before going to the details of Heidegger’s interpretation, we must ask is not Žižek’s and Davis’ account of the Ur-Willing a return to Nietzsche or even to Schopenhauer, for whom Ur-Willing is a non-personal element without any kind of subjectivity? If this is the case, then Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as the perfection of metaphysics would be right (Nietzsche seen not only as a description of the history of metaphysics but of non-historical Being). Here, Žižek’s task would be to device out of this Schopenhauerian-Hinduist Ur-Willing a reason for leftist revolution. Moreover, the reason could not be a form of eternal wisdom but something prompting a voluntarist and risk-filled attempt at social restructuring. The task seems very difficult, and the utilisation of Heidegger’s interpretation of Anaximander’s “rebellious whiling” as a ground for non-historical subjectivity sounds frankly far-fetched. Are we really supposed to believe that the “rebellious whiling” of the present, a “rebellious whiling” expressing a kind of Ur-Willing, is able to function as a litmus test of true and false revolutions? More seriously, both Anaximander and especially Heidegger may by “rebellious whiling” be talking about something quite different from non-historical Ur-Willing or Ur-Subject. For instance, Heidegger may be talking of one side of aletheia, being revealed or unconcealed, which is corresponded by an equiprimordial other side, being covered-up. These two together are the process of aletheia. That is, they are action, not actors, not subjects. Interpreting them as “drives”,34 for instance as the drive to come forth or the drive to be covered-up, and together as the drive to happen as truth, is a harmless form of anthropomorphism precisely as long as we do not construct a theory of non-historical subjectivity on the anthropomorphism (Heidegger explicitly warns against an anthropomorphic interpretation of Anaximander in GA5, 332). 104

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It is ironic that Žižek (through Davis) bases his criticism on (Heidegger’s interpretation of) this very fragment by Anaximander, because the fragment is typically interpreted as an example of the kind of balanced and eternal wisdom that Žižek does not like. Most often, the fragment is read as talking about the preservation of balance, because that which has risen has to come down. In contrast to this, Heidegger’s interpretation of the fragment does not correspond either to the view of eternal wisdom35 or to the Žižekian view of “rebellious whiling” rising out of formless emptiness, like a Lacanian drive. True to form, Heidegger (GA5, 343) interprets the double movement of coming forth and withdrawing as a feature of Being itself and not as (be-)coming that would be somehow subordinate to Being or less real than Being. Presence is connected to absence (to that which is no more or no longer present). However, Anaximander speaks of being out of joint ( δικίας), and because Heidegger has interpreted presence as a joint between presence and absence, he has to explain how the joining can be broken or, more concretely, how disorder comes about. Here his suggestion is a “rebellious whiling” that in a sense rebels against its being-joined with the absent. However, rebellious whiling is not Heidegger’s last word on the presence of beings. He goes beyond rebellious whiling by making the being-out-of-joint the other half in an essentially unitary double movement. The other half is the “mutual recognition/respect” (διδόναι […] τίσιν λλήλοις) mentioned by Anaximander which Heidegger interprets to mean that things present take care towards each other in the right manner and in this way give each other order: “The present (beings) give each other order and reck in order to overcome disorder” (GA5, 361). So, in addition to “rebellious whiling” presence is characterised by “concordant joining” and the double movement of these two is what makes up presence: The whiling present are present when they overcome the reck-less un-jointure, the δικίας, which prevails as an essential capacity in whiling.36 In other words, Being is the overcoming of rebellious whiling, and both rebellious whiling and concordant joining are genuine possibilities of beings. Rebellious whiling is something that the present can do, it is its capacity (Mögen), but that does not mean that rebellious whiling indicates an actor, a subject. It does not even mean that rebellious whiling is the property of something that is, since that which is, is only through an overcoming of rebellious whiling, as a reparation of the a-dikia. Heidegger puts the matter unequivocally: Usage [τ χρεώ]37 lets whiling be, enacting joint and reck, and cedes to the present each its while. However, at the same time is released the danger that the whiling persistence hardens into mere stuckness. So usage remains also the surrender of the present into the jointure-less. Usage un-joins.38 Both stuckness and the overcoming of stuckness by being joined are moments of use (moments in the sense of essential possibilities), not drives (for instance, drives

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towards presence) of the present (nor drives of something not yet or not anymore present) and not properties of a subject (for instance, the Ur-Willing of a subject). Davis and Žižek are right in pointing out that rebellious whiling appears rather abruptly and as if out of nowhere into Heidegger’s interpretation. He needs the notion in order to explain Anaximander’s idea about being-out-of-joint. But by neglecting the other side of rebellious whiling, “the longing for a respect and agreement that repairs order” and by anthropomorphising the whiling into a drive too quickly, their interpretation misses the asubjective process-character of Heidegger’s notion of presence. For Heidegger, presence is the coming together of two essential possibilities. Neither of these possibilities is the property or drive of some agent or subject. Furthermore, the “use” (Brauch) which consists of these two sides, is not a subject or an agent. For Heidegger, “it happens” (Es ereignet), but there is no “it” (Es) in the happening. (In Finnish, the matter is more simple, as the passive voice “Tapahtuu” (Es ereignet) contains no grammatical surrogate subject, and no number or gender either.) If the existence or the theoretical purchase of the non-historical subject (Ur-Wille) that Žižek needs hangs on a thread this thin (essentially, again, as Nietzsche noted, on the suggestive force of Indo-European grammar), it is nothing to be too excited about. NOTES 1

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It is somehow symptomatic that even though Heidegger attracted a vast number of students and devotees during his decades as a teacher and professor, he had no close collaborators. Even though there were people willing to follow Heidegger and imitate him to the detail, he did not have collaborators that would have worked close to Heidegger but still as independent voices. For instance, Gadamer starts from Heidegger, but his thinking does not, in turn, have an influence on Heidegger; the same goes for the Heideggerian theologists in Germany, the existentialists in France and the Heideggerians in Japan; the same goes for Boss, Marcuse, Löwith, Arendt, Binswanger, and so on. Heidegger did incorporate some things from his students from Japan and China, but even that happens somehow unwittingly, as if behind the backs of the students. Heidegger never lets anyone else close to the process of his thinking. He worked alone and took contentful feedback in close collaboration only from his brother Fritz, who also performed most of the typesetting of his works. Heidegger hoped that Jaspers and himself would have joined forces in rejuvenating German philosophy, and before the Nazi era the two had fruitful discussions. However, in the end Jaspers had to renounce Heidegger to the French occupying authorities by reporting that not only Heidegger in person but also his thought was fundamentally authoritarian and incapable of dialogue. Hannah Arendt’s evaluation is even more blunt and devastating. During the decades of their love relationship and friendship, Arendt felt that she was a trusted ear, a confidant, maybe a kind of atelier critic, muse, even a protector, and especially after World War II a welcome link to the outside world. But according to Arendt, Heidegger was never interested in Arendt’s thinking beyond basic courtesy. In her most bitter moments Arendt suspected that Heidegger despised the whole idea that she might have an independent philosophy of her own (see, e.g., Ettinger 1997). This distance to his students and disciples that Heidegger carefully cultivated explains in part why his closest students and colleagues, like Arendt, might have been seriously mistaken in their views on Heidegger’s politics. Arendt has also written a more metaphorical—and paradoxically more explicit—story of Heidegger as the fox who digs himself a hole that turns into a trap (1994a). Conflicts internal to the Nazi government; it was not a case of the Nazis thwarting Heidegger’s antiNazi endeavour as Heidegger wanted to present the matter after the war. Heidegger’s post-war spin on

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the matter was made possible by the fact that the faction that opposed Heidegger won and therefore became to be seen as “official Nazism”, unlike the faction that Heidegger belonged to. Heidegger’s initiatives were thrown back at least in part because the initially warm contact between himself and Ernst Krieck went sour. There is an even more distressing possibility. Arendt may have taken the argument the other way around: because she was successful in the combination, she was not, like Heidegger, a “real thinker.” It may or may not be connected that Arendt was convinced that Elfride Heidegger was responsible for having lured and involved her husband into Nazism (Zimmermann 2005, 89ff, Ettinger 1997, 71-73) Hubert Dreyfus has in his interepretations of existentialism (e.g., “The Roots of Existentialism” in Dreyfus and Wrathall 2009) presented three notions of love. Dostoyevsky: communal, altruistic and ready for sacrifice, connected to an earthy type of religiosity (Brothers Karamazov). Kierkegaard: romantic and absolute leap. Nietzsche: constant overcoming of all commitments and values. Žižek’s description of the empty subject closely resembles Dreyfus’ account of Nietzsche. Dreyfus himself— relying on Heidegger—rejects the Nietzschean version as too postmodern. Faye (2009, 238-9) claims intriguingly that when Heidegger discusses the temple as the centre where the divine is revelealed in his lecture Origin of the Work of Art, he has in mind the “Temple of Light” around the 1935 National Socialist party convention. “The Temple of Light” was designed by Albert Speer and consisted of pillars of light (projected by powerful searchlights) in a circle around the convention field. Heidegger gave the lecture in 1935 and 1936, and the first published versions of the text does not mention a particular Greek temple (the one in Paestum), but rather discusses Greek architecture in general (the architecture prepared for the Zeppelin field for the convention was pseudoGreek). It is easy to agree with Faye that considering Heidegger’s habit of connecting his deepest texts with contemporary events he saw as Being-historical, it is very likely that he is speaking of the “Temple of Light”. Correspondingly, John Sallis (2005, xiv) mentions in his foreword to Heidegger’s travel book Aufenthalte, that when Heidegger wrote the Origin of the Work of Art, he had not seen the Greek temples (in modern Italy) that he describes. Löwith (1993, 29) quotes a letter by Heidegger from 1920 in which he declares that his goal is to live and act in a revolutionry situation without caring about whether his actions promote a new culture or rather hasten the collapse. “We have quitted the deification of a groundless and powerless thinking. We see the end of a philosophy serving that thinking. The National Socialist revolution is not the mere taking of pre-existing power in a state by a party capable of it, but rather this revolution means the total transformation of our German Dasein.”; “Wir haben uns losgesagt von der Vergötzung eines boden- und machtlosen Denkens. Wir sehen das Ende der ihm dienstbaren Philosophie. […] Die nationalsozialistische Revolution ist nicht bloß die Übernahme einer vorhandenen Macht im Staat durch eine andere dazu hinreichend angewachsene Partei, sondern diese Revolution bringt die völlige Umwälzung unserer deutsches Daseins.” (GA16, 192). In his memorial address for Schlageter (Freiburg Studentenzeitung, June 1., 1933, republished in Guido Schneeberg’s Nachlese zu Heidegger, 1962, and in English in Wolin’s The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader, 1992) Heidegger enters deep into shamanistic and totemistic themes by suggesting that Schlageter, who died as a national and National Socialist martyr, gained his willpower and the clarity of his heart from the ancient granite and the clear autumn light of his homeland (which happens to be also Heidegger’s). In his speech for the 700th anniversary of his hometown Meßkirch in 1961 (“700 Jahre Meßkirch”, GA16, 575). The term “Existenz” is a relatively late addition to the vocabulary of Being and Time; Heidegger did not use the term in the lectures that led to the book. One should also remember Heidegger’s critique of existentialism in Letter on Humanism (GA9); according to Heidegger his thought is not existentialism and, in any case, existentialism understands human being wrong. In so far as Sartre and other French existentialists saw themselves as interpreters of Heidegger, they produced a fruitful misunderstanding. Heidegger thinks that these calls hit only certain unique individuals (Einzelne), and that the resoluteness and greatness of collective life is in recognising and following the unconcealment of Being that the individuals have helped to appear. Between the unique individuals (Einzelne) and the

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many (Viele) mediate the few (Wenige). In Beiträge (GA65, 96-97) Heidegger describes the few as an avant-garde group devoted to the truth that the Einzelne have revealed in their poetry, thought, acts and sacrifices (Dichtung, Denken, Tat, Opfer). The few intuit the new shape of truth in the works of the Einzelne, they protect the truth and make it visible for the many. Cutting corners, one could put Heidegger’s view in modern terms by saying that he suspected that Leninism is some kind of transhumanism. August 28., 1947, http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeidegger.htm January 20., 1948, http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeidegger.htm Marcuse points out that Heidegger misconstrues the analogy: the Nazis murdered Jews, while the Allies forcibly relocated and forcibly set a political system for the Eastern Germans. Like Žižek notes, even though the distinction is in some sense small, Marcuse is right in saying that in that particular situation it is the distinction between barbarism and civilisation (2009b, 262; more precisely, Marcuse says that by neglecting the distinction, Heidegger ends up outside the sphere of logos). Also the other famous claim by Heidegger on the extermination camps contains a similar factual mistake: we will return to it below. May 12., 1948, http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/pubs/40spubs/47MarcuseHeidegger.htm Another potentially even more disturbing example of Heidegger’s selective attitude towards “essence” is his relationship to Paul Celan and his poetry. One might think that Heidegger, for whom language and people were two of the most central notions, would have been interested in Celan’s problem: what happens to a language, when a people that speaks the language (German Jews) is murdered by another people that also speaks the language (German-speaking Germans)? The problem sounds maximally Heideggerian. Still it seems that in Celan’s poetry Heidegger was interested in two of his other favourite themes, the roots of language in time and Being (Lyon, 2006). In order to give Žižek more grist to his mill, one could point out how Celan and Heidegger wanted to avoid the problem and consequently found common ground in discussing—flowers, insects and other natural phenomena. In any case, Heidegger is very selective when he recognises the “essence” of something, in this case the “essence” of Celan’s German and its question. “[…] die Endform des Marxismus, die wesentlich weder mit Judentum noch gar nicht mit dem Russentum etwas zu tun hat; wenn irgendwo noch ein unentfalteter Spiritualismus schlummert, dann im russischen Volk; der Bolschewismus ist ursprünglich westlich, europäische Möglichkeit, das Heraufkommen der Massen, die Industrie, Technik, das Absterben des Christemtums; sofern aber die Vernunftherrschaft als Gleichsetzung aller nur die Folge des Christentums ist und dieses im Grunde jüdischen Ursprungs (vgl. Nietzsches Gedanke vom Sklavenaufstand der Moral), ist der Bolschewismus in der Tat jüdisch; aber dann ist auch das Christentum im Grunde bolschewistisch!” (GA65, 54). See Kisiel (1995). It is good to remember that the authorised version of the Spiegel interview in Antwort. Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Neske & Kettering 1988) is different from the interview published in Der Spiegel in May 1976. Most translations are based on the Antwort version which omits several passages on—Nazism. However, these passages are not particularly scandalous, so the insistence by the copyright holders that translations be based on the Antwort version tells more of the care they take than of a real need for censorship. Tammilehto’s description of the relationship between capitalism and Fascism fits well with the Marxist account, but his view of Nazism as a system of modern effectivity is too simplified. When Žižek writes (2005) in his critique of Ernst Nolte that “Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism”, he is right, but some kind of Heideggerianism could retort: “Antagonism in the understanding of Being, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; internationalist socialism displaces this essential antagonism.” To be sure, Heidegger does not claim to live as a peasant. Rather he says that he works like and with the farmers, in their circumstances and in their ways. So it is fitting that his famous Schwarzwaldian peasant attire was not a family heirloom or a second hand find, but a designer product that the artist Otto Ubbelohde produced for Heidegger (Safranski 1999, 131).

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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539-6,00.html See, e.g., Hitler’s speech on January 30., 1937: “It goes without saying that in the economic sphere and with the passing of time experience has given rise to the employment of certain definite principles [...]. But all methods and principles are subject to the time element. To make hard-and-fast dogmas out of practical methods would deprive the human faculties and working power of that elasticity which alone enables them to face changing demands [...] There were many persons among us who busied themselves [...] in an effort to formulate dogmas from economic methods and then raise that dogmatic system to a branch of our university curriculum, under the title of national economy. According to the pronouncements issued by these national economists, Germany was irrevocably lost. […] For the last eighteen [sic] years we have been witnessing a rare spectacle. Our economic dogmatists have been proved wrong in almost every branch of practical life and yet they repudiate those who have actually overcome the economic crisis, as propagators of false theories and damn them accordingly. […] The German economic policy which National Socialism introduced in 1933 is based on some fundamental considerations. In the relations between economics and the people, the people alone is the only unchangeable element. Economic activity in itself is no dogma and never can be such. There is no economic theory or opinion which can claim to be considered as sacrosanct. The will to place the economic system at the service of the people, and capital at the service of economics, is the only thing that is of decisive importance here.” http://www.calvin.edu/ academic/cas/gpa/hitler1.htm Jünger moves rather seamlessly in Eumeswil (1977) from the Gestalt of the worker to the notion of the anarch (not anarchist) who refuses to “outsource” or “delegate” any tasks essential to his life. The refusal goes for material tasks (animals one eats have to be killed by oneself, wars must be waged by oneself) as well as spiritual tasks. The anarch, like the worker, does not in a bourgeois way outsource the production of meaning to a philharmonic orchestra or to TV shows. “Der Mensch starrt auf das, was mit der Explosion der Atombombe kommen könnte. Der Mensch sieht nicht, was lang schon angekommen ist und zwar geschehen ist als das, was nur noch als seinen letzten Auswurf die Atombombe und deren Explosion aus sich hinauswirft, um von der einen Wasserstoffbombe zu schweigen, deren Initialzündung, in der weitesten Möglichkeit gedacht, genügen könnte, um alles Leben auf der Erde auszulöschen. Worauf wartet diese ratlose Angst noch, wenn das Entsetzliche schon geschehen ist.” (GA7, 168) Here Heidegger is surprisingly close to another “secret king” of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien who in the Lord of the Rings saw history as continuous diminution: good is less good than before, bad less bad than before. However, unlike Tolkien, Heidegger thinks that a new beginning is always possible. Both Tolkien and Heidegger had an intensive and complicated relationship with religion, both loved the forest as a real thing and as a metaphor, both loathed the uprooting produced by technology, both believed in the edifying and ethical power of ancient words and etymology, up to the point of word-magic, both admired tools that had been refined by generations of use, and both embraced a mythological conception of fate (and the contradiction between the mythological account of destiny and the Catholic heritage is present in almost every page of their writings). Tolkien’s explicit goal was to utilize fiction in creating for England a legendary past collected in saga like tales; a goal that Elias Lönnrot maybe in its most pure form achieved for Finland in Kalevala. Is there not a parallel in Heidegger’s work? Does he not try to do something similar for thinking, in its Greco-German form? He wants to rewrite the history of philosophy, give it a rich, new background complete with resonant words, so that all that has been and will be done gains a new meaning. Both Tolkien and Heidegger want to make language resonate in a way that brings out the echoes of past lives and lifetimes and the possibilities of a future saturated with near impossible tasks through which the fate of humans, technology and gods is decided. It is intriguing that despite having been “secret” kings, both are bestsellers well known beyond their immediate professional circles and both enjoy linguistic influence well beyond their genres. “Wenn heute der Führer immer wieder spricht von der Umerziehung zur nationalsozialistischen Weltanschauung, heißt das nicht irgendwelche Schlagworte beibringen, sondern einen Gesamtwandel hervorbringen, einen Weltentwurf, aus dessen Grund heraus er das ganze Volk erzieht. Der Nationalsozialismus ist nicht irgendwelche Lehre, sondern der Wandel von Grund aus der deutschen und, wie wir glauben, auch der europäischen Welt.” (GA 36/37, 225)

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In terms of the history of philosophy, Žižek tells that he wants to function as “Hegel’s Luther”; it is obvious that “non-metaphysical non-historicalness” and “transcendental materialism” need some kind of dialectical paradox (see Johnston, 2007). In Diels-Kranz B1; “έξ ν δέ γένεσίς έστι το ς ο σι, καὶ ὶ τ ν φθορ ν ε ς τα τα γίνεσθαι κατ τ χρεών· διδόναι γ ρ α τ δίκην καὶ τίσιν λλήλοις τ ς δικίας κατ τ ν το χρόνου τάξιν”, most often (Heidegger agrees) the passage authentically by Anaximander is thought to be “κατ τ χρεών· διδόναι γ ρ α τ δίκην καὶ τίσιν λλήλοις τ ς δικίας.” “Das Angekommene kann gar auf seiner Weile bestehen, einzig um dadurch anwesender zu bleiben im Sinne des Beständigen. Das Je-Weilige beharrt auf seinem Anwesen. Dergestalt nimmt es sich aus seiner übergänglichen Weile heraus. Es spreizt sich in den Eigensinn des Beharrens auf. Es kehrt sich nicht mehr an das andere Anwesende. Es versteift sich, als sei dies das Verweilen, auf die Beständigkeit des Fortbestehens.” (GA5, 355) Žižek (2007a, 37): “For anyone minimally versed in Freud and Lacan, Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander’s ‘disorder’ cannot but evoke the Freudian drive, his formulation renders perfectly the ‘stuckness’, fixation, of the drive onto a certain impossible point around which it circulates, obeying a compulsion to repeat. At its most elementary, drive is a ‘rebellious whiling’, which derails the ‘natural’ flow.” Because Heidegger abandons the themes of justice and punishment that are often seen in the fragment, as, for instance, by Nietzsche, who translates: “Woher die Dinge ihre Entstehung haben, dahin müssen sie auch zu Grunde gehen, nach der Notwendigkeit; denn sie müssen Buße zahlen und für ihre Ungerechtigkeiten gerichtet werden, gemäß der Ordnung der Zeit” (quoted in Varto 1994). “Die je-weilig Anwesenden wesen an, indem sie den ruch-losen Un-Fug verwinden, die δικίας, die als ein wesenhaftes Mögen im Weilen selbst waltet. Anwesen des Anwesenden ist solches Verwinden.” (GA5, 363) Der Brauch translating τ χρεώ. τ χρεώ is usually translated as “necessity”; Heidegger wants to include connotations of practice, usurfuct, protection (by hands) and giving. “Der Brauch [τ χρεώ] läßt, Fug und Ruch verfügend, in die Weile los und überläßt das Anwesende je seiner Weile. Damit ist es aber auch in die ständige Gefahr eingelassen, daß es sich aus dem weilenden Verharren in das bloße Beharren verhärtet. So bleibt der Brauch in sich zugleich die Aushändigung des Anwesens in den Un-Fug. Der Brauch fügt das Un-.” (GA5, 36)

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INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE AND CONCENTRATION CAMPS OR THE WILL AND EVIL

The lecture “Das Gestell” held by Heidegger in Bremen in 1949 contains the infamous sentence omitted from the published version of the lecture under the title “Die Frage nach der Technik” (in Vorträge und Aufsätze, GA7):1 Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs. This is the most clear example of Heidegger’s defence in terms of “a pile of bodies”: the genocide of the Jews and Nazism are lost as a drop in the sea of all Western forgetting of Being. At the same time the passage is a good crystallisation of his view on technology, according to which the modern understanding of Being is characterised by the fact that it encounters everything as a resource to be manipulated, as raw material for work. This is what Heidegger means by “essential sameness”: to be is to be raw material for technological utilisation. Heidegger’s claim is true, up to a point. One of the uniquely horrifying features of Nazi extermination camps (with their gas chambers and giant grills and crematoria for human bodies) was their neatly calculated efficiency in terms of engineering The model for mass-murdering humans was taken from mass production. The extermination camps were industrial complexes for murder. With his callous claim, Heidegger reveals something essential about extermination camps and modernity. At the same time, Heidegger misses something crucial, like Žižek, again following Davis, notes. Murdering people on a mass scale contains a dimension of evil that mere technological understanding of Being with all of its horrible consequences lacks. To describe this evil as faceless industrial murder forgets that it is possible, as Davis (2007, 297, quoted in Žižek 2007a, 35) writes: for a person to look another person in the face and, clearly sensing the withdrawal of interiority, wilfully pull the trigger, or point a finger in the direction of the gas chambers. The wickedness of this face-to-face defacement—this wicked will to power that wills the murder of the Other as Other, in other words, that wills to maintain a recognition of the Other precisely in order to take diabolical pleasure in annihilating his or her otherness—radically exceeds the evil of the calculating machinations of technology.

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Through Davis’ observation Žižek wants to draw attention to the fact that what distinguishes genocide from industrial agriculture, blockades, the construction of bombs and other forms of technological domination is the nature of the murders: in genocide the objects are humans, subjects, and the perpetrators are also humans, subjects. Žižek asks could Heidegger defend his claim by saying that it is not him that is putting vegetables, agricultural soil and the victims of genocide on the same level, but that the levelling has already been performed by the technological forgetting of Being that he is simply describing. Žižek (2007a, 36) replies to his own question: The answer is clear: Heidegger is simply (and crucially) wrong in reducing the Holocaust to a technological production of corpses; there is in events like the Holocaust a crucial element of the will to humiliate and hurt the other. The victim is treated as an object in a reflexive way, in order to humiliate him further, in clear contrast to the industrially produced vegetable, where this intention to hurt is absent […] We are at a crucial watershed. According to Žižek, Heidegger’s claim shows that Heidegger neglects the non-historical subjectivity evident in the will to humiliate. And it is true that this is what Heidegger does. His claim fails to observe that when agricultural land is treated technologically and when humans are treated technologically, the former happens between ontologically different beings and the latter between ontologically similar. In this way, Heidegger presents himself as insensitive to human suffering. As further evidence Žižek presents Heidegger’s theoretical (and personal?) inability to discuss trauma or traumatic encounters (Žižek 2007a, 36). Žižek defines trauma as a situation in which the ontic enters the ontological so forcefully that the ontological order is broken, the ontological horizon of meaning stops functioning and, consequently, reality ceases to be real. The holocaust as trauma means a darkening of the world where the world as such loses its meaning. It is again true that Heidegger does not discuss the holocaust as a trauma, and does not, in general, seem to have discussed the horrors of the Second World War as shattering ontic intrusions into the ontological. On the contrary, he insists that on the ontological level the war decided nothing. Even so, Žižek’s claim that Heidegger’s theory is unable to discuss trauma may yield less than Žižek hopes. For is not Heidegger’s account of anxiety precisely a description of the loss of meaning in the sense that Žižek is after? Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that anxiety would be the only phenomenon that according to Heidegger is able to register the shattering entry of the ontic into the ontological structures of Dasein. In the extreme, it could be claimed that the whole point of Dasein philosophy is to make possible a theoretical description of how the ontic is able to have an effect on the ontological. Even if it is true that Heidegger “under-theorises” the social or personal trauma2 of the Second World War, it seems fully possible to use his philosophy for such theorising. Be that as it may, the decisive question concerns the subject. Žižek wants to show that Heidegger misses the category of the subject involved in the phenomenon of the 112

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holocaust and that this category is something that Heidegger should have retained. Rather than after the war seeking the full and paradoxical extinguishing of the will through a mysticism of the Gelassenheit, Heidegger should have noticed the role of the subject in genocide, a role that is not historical or temporal. Žižek concludes the decisive rehabilitation of the subject in his essay by criticising Heidegger’s though on Gelassenheit. He interprets Heidegger’s view on Gelassenheit as a description of a balanced and harmonious Being, undisturbed by willing and the accompanying technological vision. Žižek presents a reminder: “Beware of gentle openness!” (2007a, 37), his assumption being that Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment and of Gelassenheit as unforced openness towards truth leads Heidegger away from politics and, consequently, from authentic philosophy. According to this interpretation, Heidegger thinks that there first is an undisturbed Being that gets thrown out of balance by willing and that can then be restored to a harmonious state through Gelassenheit. In contrast, Žižek asks could it not be that only the surplus of inexplicable stuckness of Ur-Willing gives the possibility of Gelassenheit? What if the world is possible only through this essential disturbance and its drive? Žižek himself answers in the positive, and insists that what comes first is the disturbance of Ur-Willing and only second we get the world and its possible harmony. According to Žižek, a retreat from the world into the will-less Gelassenheit is possible only because the world is already conditioned by Ur-Willing (2007a, 37). From this Žižek (2007a, 37) derives two consequences that need to be quoted in their entirety: First, that human finitude strictly equals infinity: the obscene “immortality”/ infinity of drive which insists “beyond life and death”. Second, the name of this diabolical excess of willing which “perverts” the order of Being is subject. Subject thus cannot be reduced to an epoch of Being, to the modern subjectivity bent on technological domination—there is, underlying it, a “non-historical” subject. Žižek is certainly right that some interpretations of Gelassenheit mysticism— especially those leaning towards new age or Buddhist ecologism—can include a presupposition of an essentially harmonious ground-level of Being. But like we saw above, Heidegger did not in his revolution reach for a harmonious and balanced totality, not in terms of an organic national body nor in terms of European Dasein. Žižek indirectly admits as much, when he values the political Heidegger of the 1930’s the highest. Heidegger II (if Heidegger I is the Heidegger of Being and Time and Heidegger III the post-war Heidegger), at least, does not commit the mistake of imagining Being as basically harmonious until the technological Dasein with its will to power starts its disturbing activities. It is not certain, either, that Žižek’s critique hits the target with regard to Heidegger III who, according to the critique, would aim for a seamless harmony through a complete putting off of human will. To be precise, Heidegger sees technological understanding of Being as based on a “will to will”, i.e., a will that wills itself and 113

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its certainty. The will to will is the perfection of the Nietzschean will to power. The will to will means a continuous growth of the will, a tireless rotation of the circle of subjectivity, so that what is left is only the self-assured subject and the objects that it wills. This kind of will to will is the ground of the technological world that appears as the Jüngerian total mobilisation. Consequently, in his philosophy of technology, Heidegger wants to overcome the will to will. Gelassenheit is the form of the overcoming. However, it is not clear that Gelassenheit means a complete Buddhist extinguishing of the will. For instance, Heidegger describes Gelassenheit towards technological devices as a relation in which we at the same time say both “yes” and “no” to the devices. Maybe we utilise a device, but we do not let the understanding of Being embedded in it and revealed through it take over our whole world or to cover up the question of Being. The question of what Heidegger III thought about the will is a thorny one, but at least it is possible to claim that Heidegger wanted European Dasein to let go of the will to will but not necessarily to let go of all willing or all forms of the will.3 The account of the will in Heidegger III is characterised by a dialectic of willing and non-willing,4 a move to a dimension beyond the will, and not by an “Eastern” hands-on practice of extinguishing the will. Finally, the most crucial misunderstanding concerns Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). As is well known, Heidegger bases his account of truth on the Greek word aletheia, distinguishing two parts in the word: lethe, meaning concealment or withdrawal, an the negating prefix a-. Consequently, for Heidegger truth is the disclosure of concealment, often quite literally in the sense that what is disclosed is the fact that the present as present is concealed (or, vice versa, the concealment of disclosure, meaning that what is concealed is the disclosure of the present as present). We also know that for Heidegger the access to truth is not aggressive or technologically mediated penetration, but rather a processual Gelassenheit, a pious preparedness persisting in the clearing (Lichtung). But all of this does not mean that the quest for truth or encountering the truth would according to Heidegger—even Heidegger III—be something relaxed and laid-back. On the contrary. In all of his phases, Heidegger insist on two distinctly dynamic and unharmonious features of truth. First, truth is something inconvenient and dangerous that at the very least exposes the one who encounters truth to inhuman elementary powers if it does not outright burn her or him in a flash of lightning.5 Truth and the work embodying truth are for Heidegger forces that depersonalise and dissolve subjectivity. Second, and more crucially, truth itself is inharmonious, tense, filled with struggle (kämpferisch). Structurally the tension is created between the two poles of disclosement and concealment. Truth needs both of these and the tension between them. It is good to remember that when Heidegger emphasises the roots of Europeanness in Greek antiquity and the Greek origin of his own account of truth, he is referring to the essence of the Greek world, which according to him was its “agonistic severity” (1989). The true greatness of the Greeks is, in Heidegger’s view, that they saw truth as kämpferisch, as Heraclitus’ polemos that gives birth to “masters and slaves”. Also the greatness of Hölderlin is connected to the way in 114

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which he recognises the strife between gods, and describes the animosity between gods as the basic attunement of the authentic (German) soil and life on it (GA39). Only this blessed animosity and contradiction gives humans a place to live and dwell in. The mistake Žižek among others makes in interpreting Heidegger III is based on an oversight. Heidegger does say that truth is not a matter of personal will or individual activity, but that does not mean that truth in general would not be a matter of struggle and contradiction. The struggles and contradictions are on a non-individual level, inside truth itself. Heidegger himself was always amongst the first to remind of the illusions of gentle openness and to warn against dreams of harmonious nomad existence (like Žižek rightly notes elsewhere).

* Žižek fails to mention Heidegger’s other, nearly as notorious sentence on extermination camps. In this sentence Heidegger in a curious way notes that the camps are unique, incomparable, and that the uniqueness is connected to human being as Dasein. The passage (also from the Bremen lectures, this time from a lecture called “Die Gefahr”) is: Hundreds of thousands die in masses. Do they die? They perish. They are bumped off. Do they die? They become the production units of a fabrication of corpses. Do they die? They are inconspicuously liquidated in extermination camps. And even without this—right now millions end up dead through hunger in China. However, to die means to carry out death in its essence. To be able to die means the capacity for this carrying out. We are capable of it only when the essence of death makes our essence.6 Again Heidegger is insensitive towards the victims by suggesting that they are left outside the essence of death only because an outside force rams them down in a technological way. But at the same time Heidegger recognises in his own terms that the extermination camps take away humanity by taking away the essence of death. In Heidegger’s ontology, this is a very bad crime, since death is the root of meaning and authenticity. The extermination camps treat humans as humans in an evil way, because they take away the possibility of dying, leaving room only for going under or being killed. It is striking that, again, Heidegger’s account omits the face-to-face nature of the camps. He does not recognise the destruction of otherness. To be more precise, he mentions one half of the face-to-face encounter, the fact that mere demise takes away the face of the victim, neglects their essence, their death. This Heidegger notes and comments on. But he does not give faces to the builders of the camp, to the trigger-pullers, the gas chamber operators, the train personnel and so on—not even to the instigators of the Chinese famine. What is their role in the degeneration of death into mere demise? What are their faces? Žižek and Davis are half right. Heidegger does not discuss the faces of the people robbing death of its essence. Therefore he misses a big part of the evil 115

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of extermination camps. However, this does not mean that the evil of the camps could be recognised only if we accept a notion of non-historical subjectivity. The destruction of the other or otherness and the planned and purposeful degeneration of death are possible also when the victims and perpetrators are something less or more than subjects, for instance, cases of Heideggerian Dasein. In fact, murder and the obliteration of otherness are easier to understand when the perpetrators are seen as non-individual. Does the increased understandability imply an ounce of acceptability? Is Žižek’s and Davis’ insistence on the non-historical subject motivated by the worry that if we let go of it, an amount, however small, of acceptability is accorded to the crimes? Understandability does not entail acceptability. The Dasein building and operating extermination camps, the Dasein perpetrating genocide becomes more repulsive and horrifying when we understand it without recourse to a-historical notions. The crimes of German Dasein are real and historical and are not reduced into the criminally prosecutable culpability of individual subjects like Eichmann—even though the criminal prosecution and punishment must be carried out, as well. This view may be depressing for the kind of modernism that relies on Enlightenment notions of individual freedom and responsibility, but it is, perhaps, more strict and calls for a higher standard of responsibility than the subject-centred account, precisely because it sees the ease with which supposedly eternal and universal subjects are dissolved. There are good reasons for thinking that the murder of a person with a face by another person with a face is evil in a different way than the murderous outburst of a bundle of desires raised into racism and xenophobia or the cool and distanced push of the button by a technocratic “happy robot” steeped in discipline and hierarchy. However, these differences are mainly moralistic or legalistic. A sober analysis of revolutionary humanity does not suggest that such differences play an active role in the conduct of major social upheavals. Most importantly, the differences show that sometimes people act “with faces” or “as subjects”, if you will, but they do not show that there is a non-historical subjectivity. In order to condemn the perpetrators of crimes against humanity or in order to think that the planners and operators of extermination camps are evil we do not need a concept of non-historical subjectivity. Moreover, neither a theory of humans as non-historical subjects nor a theory of humans as asubjective Dasein is able to make extermination camps impossible. Žižek is right in insisting that Heideggerian Dasein philosophy should be able to recognise the face of the murderers of the death camps much better than Heidegger himself did. The extermination camps not only took away the possibility of authentic death from the victims, they also revealed the murderous evil of their planners and operators. Of this Heidegger says nothing. But the need to recognise the murderers as murderers and Heidegger’s failure in this task do not mean that the only option is to utilise the concept of non-historical subjectivity. For how could something non-historical, i.e., something universal, give a face to anything? A face is not a structure (like Levinas so eloquently shows). The ethical demand of the other’s face resides in its unfathomable uniqueness rather than in its 116

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ahistorical structurality. From this follows the other half of the question. Is Žižek’s rehabilitation of the subject successful? If it is not, how should an asubjective view reply to Žižek’s and Davis’ correct observation of the difference between the holocaust and industrial agriculture? The birth of the subject is in Žižek’s theory always a matter of violence: the subject is the fracture in the symbolic universe that at the same time creates that universe. Consequently, it is impossible to have an intact, unbroken symbolic universe. The symbolic exists only through the break caused by the presence of the subject (reality not only exists from a particular point of view, it exists because of a particular point of view). Similarly, a revolutionary act is always violent as it rearranges the symbolic coordinates of the possible. Žižek claims that Heidegger thinks that through Gelassenheit a whole, unbroken symbolic sphere is possible. This is why Žižek wants to turn the Heideggerian account around and says that we first need a subject violently thrown into the symbolic before we can start hoping for a harmony and wholeness—even though they will be impossible anyhow. Thus, the subject can not be reduced into a particular historical moment. The very hankering after a harmonic and whole symbolic sphere shows the existence of a non-historical subject. To put it in another, more Lacanian way, the existence of drive (corresponding to the Ur-Wille) proves the same point: the drive disturbing the wholeness is primary and in a sense produces finitude. When Heidegger insists on the finitude of Dasein, he paradoxically proves the existence of non-historical and universal Will and subjectivity. The first and maybe also the most crucial objection to Žižek’s rehabilitation of the subject is familiar. Like Descartes rushing from the existence of doubt into the existence of a thinking ego, Žižek moves with astonishing speed from the special nature of face-to-face humiliation and murder to an unhistorical subject. Would it not be perfectly possible to explain why it is a different matter to torment and kill vegetables than to torment and kill humans without presupposing a universal subjectivity? One could claim, for example, that humans are conscious and social and capable of a qualitatively different kind of pain compared to plants. And why would the special nature of humiliating and murdering humans prove that precisely a universal kind of subjectivity exists? Does not this leap of thought contain a clear case of the circle of subjectivity: the reason for the special nature of humiliating and murdering humans is the subject, because we have already presupposed that the subject is something special, even universal and non-historical? Where, exactly, is that universal subjectivity located? In the theory of the symbolic sphere? But that theory in its Žižekian form is a recent invention. Neither Lenin nor Hegel nor the classic Greek thinkers knew anything about it. Or is Žižek suggesting that also humans that do not experience themselves as subjects and in whose experience or language we can not find evidence of permanent subjectual structures nonetheless really are subjects in some sense? Maybe potential subjects, subjects-to-be? The difference between extermination camps and industrial agriculture can be accounted for without the notion of universal subjectivity. This is significant for the 117

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theory of revolution, because it means that Žižek’s combination of the revolutionary act with the universal subject is not necessary. In so far as the ground for rehabilitating the subject is artificial and thin, the ground for the revolutionary act is thin, too. In addition, one may present other sceptical observations with regard to the presuppositions of the Žižekian rehabilitation. From a non-anthropocentric perspective one might ask, for instance, is it sure that industrial agriculture does not contain an element of humiliation, a residue of the will-to-humiliate? Would not, indeed, some forms of feminist ecological thinking point out that industrial agriculture contains a clearly identifiable hatred of nature and a will to violate it? Could that not be seen as a characteristic feature of all forms of technological domination based on natural science? Is modern natural science not heir to the attitude of wresting the secrets of nature from her and is not modern production the harnessing of Mother Earth into the iron chains of production? And is not animate and inanimate nature here treated as otherness to be subordinated? Even if a will to humiliate is inherent in modernism as the alliance between science, technology and productivism, it does not mean that humiliating humans is no different from humiliating plants. Rather, it indicates that from the humiliation of inanimate matter to the humiliation of humans there exists a continuous scale, rather than an clear-cut hierarchy between a historical phenomenon (industrial agriculture) and a non-historical absolute (murdering subjects). On this scale, the utilisation of the soil as a resource, industrial vegetable production, industrial meat production, fur farms, capitalist production of famines, killing by drones and technological genocide share some characteristics, like a distance between the subject and the object, a will to technological control, a presupposition that control is good, a bourgeois preference for division of labour and massive scales, so that the individual does not have to inconvenience her- or himself even though she or he might be aware of the killing on some level. At the same time the phenomena on the scale have important differences, for instance because the capacity for suffering in the different objects of domination is different. To notice some similarities between forms of technological domination is not to flick an on-off switch so that all ethical distinctions disappear. In any case, if we let go of the notion of non-historical subjectivity, we enter a world of gradual differences and shifting qualities without absolute structural distinctions between what is subjective (what is a subject) and what is not. From the opposite angle, Žižek’s absolute distinction between industrial agriculture and extermination camps can be seen as a part of his techno-optimism. The subject is special because it is a structure in the symbolic space. Therefore no scientific or technological manipulation of the material world is an essential threat to the subject. This is why Žižek (e.g., 2003b) pokes fun at the Catholic church for its reservations towards genetic technology. If the Catholic church really did believe in a non-historical soul, like Žižek believes in a non-historical subject, then it would realise that no genetic manipulation can touch the essence of humanity. According to Žižek, the Catholic church should be in one of the best positions to understand that the body can be modified, because such modification leaves the soul unharmed. This 118

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is also Žižek’s attitude: the material world and human bodies can be technologically modified for the better since such modifications do not touch universal subjectivity in its symbolic haven. From this angle we can also see that Žižek’s rehabilitation of the subject does not succeed in avoiding Europocentrism. Once again this is no secret, as Žižek himself is proud to note the paradoxical Europocentrism of his universalism. In a typically colonialist way, the notion of a non-historical and universal subject in Žižek means that some entities that commonsensically seem like subjects (or humans) are not so. For instance, if a group of people ekes out a premodern livelihood in harmony with nature in a remote area without knowledge of the metaphysics of subjectivity or the complexes described in psychoanalytic theory, they are not, according to Žižek’s theory, subjects. At least not yet. This is a typical qualification: even such hypothetical people living the illusion of wholesome Gelassenheit, have to grow up, become adults, which means that they have to assume their position in the symbolic sphere as European subjects with European tasks. This colonialism is a direct consequence of the non-empirical nature of the notion of the subject. What if it really was possible to show to Žižek a people or an individual with no “obscene” surplus of drive/will, with no intolerable cut between man and nature? How would Žižek find the form of non-historical subjectivity from this empirical content? And if he could not find it, could it be produced? Maybe by taking the individual to Paris, by telling what symbols really are, what is reading and writing and what is the true relationship between man and nature? Surely this could be done, the subject could be produced, like it has been done so many times before. In this sense the individual in the example would in the eyes of Žižek’s theory be a potential subject. From a Foucaultian perspective one should reply that to be a potential subject is to be the object of a colonialist project and that Žižek’s Lacanian theory is a tool of this project. Once again the non-historical subject turns out to be something that is not discovered (in nature or in society) but is produced. The question above is not a joke, since Žižek writes about becoming a revolutionary subject in terms of maturing or becoming an adult. For instance, according to Žižek the lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the analysand recognises the role of the Big Other in his or her psychological economy and consequently stops directing her/his acts to a Big Other. Acts that are not done for the Big Other, are elementary revolutionary acts because they are done voluntaristically, creating new meaning. Revolutionary acts change the coordinates of the symbolic, because the Big Other is the name for the symbolic knot that holds the symbolic together. In this way Žižek’s account of Lacanian analysis contains a familiar coming-of-age story. Individuals that have gone through Lacanian analysis are most mature, whereas individuals that have not done so are typically blindly serving some particular symbolic order. From the Arctic to the Amazon, becoming an adult is for Žižek essentially becoming European—what a curious consequence of the supposition of universal subjectivity! Zooming out a bit one may ask is not Žižek’s story a version of the well-worn tale in which the progress of civilisation starts from the overcoming of paganism 119

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through the religions of the Book? Žižek is especially keen on Christianity, because it ingeniously universalizes belief from its ethnic origins. Further on, Žižek wants to add one thing to Christianity: atheism. The death of Christ means that the Holy Ghost is the collective of the Christians without a supernatural God, without a meaningguaranteeing Big Other. This collective that has become adult, i.e., has done away with the blind reliance on a Big Other, only needs some minor ideologico-critical updates so that we get a picture of the Žižekian ideal collective. Even though Žižek’s advocation of this progressivist narrative (paganism, Christianity, atheism) may sound refreshingly unfashionable, the narrative itself is still facile. However, we should not let Heidegger too easily off the hook. One of the oddest features in Heidegger’s thinking is that even though he typically is consistent in dismantling metaphysical dichotomies, he maintains the unconditional difference between humans and animals.7 Typically, Heidegger expresses the distinction by saying that humans as Dasein have a world, whereas animals do not; they just have an environment into which they are fully submerged and to which they react. Here the term “world” means the totality of meaning into which all particular meaningful acts, observations, practices, and so on, belong. To use Heidegger’s own example: humans do not first perceive something and then give the perception some meaning. Rather, humans always already live in meaning. For instance, we do not hear uninterpreted sets of specific frequencies from a certain direction, but hear a motorcycle approaching from the right. The world of meaningful experience always comes first, and only on the basis of it can we build practices (like natural science) that educate us to attend to sensory data without meaning. Hearing the sound of an approaching motorbike is connected to a whole world in which things like motorbikes, driving, approaching, reasons for movement, and so on do exist. Any single meaningful phenomenon reveals a whole background of meaning, a background that Heidegger calls the world. The world is, according to Heidegger, a world of language, of logos, in the wide sense of the term. The world is always already there before the individual, it is structured in a particular way and possesses a directive power. The world has a history, it can change, when Being invites Dasein to a new kind of unconcealment, a new understanding of Being. Because meaning is not mere data and is not pointlike, but has its interconnections and directions of flow, it can be thought of as logos. Accordingly, the worldlessness of animals seems to correspond fairly closely to the traditional account in which language separates humans from animals. However, it must be noted that the world is for Heidegger something much bigger than language narrowly understood: the world is a historical and non-individual background of meaning. The animal only has an environment that does not change historically (but maybe physically): the animal can not change its environment through a collective, shared shift in the understanding of Being. But if this is the case, how can Heidegger think that industrial agriculture and extermination camps are essentially the same? How can he see death camps and, say, cattle-raising as the same if there is a crucial ontological difference between 120

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humans and animals? Of course, Heidegger does not explicitly mention the industrial fabrication of animal products, but still he should have in mind the ontological uniqueness of humans as Dasein. Again one might respond by saying that the essential sameness in industrial agriculture and extermination camps is that despite the difference in the ontological status of the objects, both treat them as resources to be calculatingly manipulated. No matter what technology encounters, it encounters it as a resource. This is most likely what Heidegger aims at in his comparison. Still, he fails to note that according to his own philosophy, the extermination camp is unique in that there humans treat humans as resources, and, moreover, kill them. Put in the terminology of Being and Time, Dasein can live authentically or inauthentically, it can resolutely own its situation or fall, willy-nilly, into das Man. In our historical moment, living as das Man means treating oneself and others as resources to be utilised, developed, optimised, maximised. In other words, as fallen into the world of das Man, Dasein can understand itself as a resource, but animals do not have this possibility. Therefore death camps should in Heidegger’s ontology be different from industrial agriculture. On the basis of his own philosophy, Heidegger can not say that we lose no more when a person is killed compared to when a cow is killed. This is what he indicates by saying that the death camps obliterate authentic death. It is a different question whether Heidegger’s distinction between humans and animals is tenable in the first place. It is true that animals do not typically have historically changing cultures. But once again we can question the absoluteness of the distinction and pay attention to intermediary cases. First, it can be claimed that many mammals have a world of some kind, even if they do not have a full-blown universe of logos. To take a cue from Arendt, let us think of a fox cub born into a foxhole. In the hole and its near surroundings, the cub is in an environment that has not only been selected but also modified by (potentially several generations of) foxes. Here, its instinctive behaviour and needs meet a specific response: the safety of the hole, nurture by the mother, play with the siblings and so on. These together with the wider environment constitute a meaningful arena of action for the cub. The rudimentary worldhood of this arena is shown by the fact that if the cub is raised, for instance, in a zoo or as a surrogate dog in a human house, it turns out different. Things around it mean different things to it, it reacts differently, its needs and satisfactions are altered. It is true that the fox can not with other foxes reveal a historically new world. But it is still wrong to say that the fox would have no background of meaning for its acts, no background according to which things are more or less meaningful for it. In this way, the fox has a rudimentary world, maybe a world that is historically frozen or inert, changing much slower than the human world. This may be the reason why Heidegger sometimes (GA29/30, 263) calls animals poor in world (weltarm) rather than completely worldless. Second, the relativisation of the distinction may be continued by noticing that some groups of animals actually do have historically changing worlds. For instance, in bonobos and Japanese macaques researchers have documented groups in which the use of certain tools or practices like washing certain kinds of foods are learned 121

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through generations. For instance, a group might use a particular type of rock for breaking nuts, and has to bring the rocks and nuts together since they do not appear in the same area. The behaviour is transmitted through generations, and other groups nearby do not eat the nuts because they can not open them. Accordingly, we can say that the life of these groups contains historical changes that make the totality of their world different from other groups of the same species. These changes can be forgotten, the situation can revert back to where it started, but that actually is the whole point: the world of at least some groups of animals may change in response to the practices of the group (or the practices may change in response to the change in world, if you like). It would be sheer anthropocentric prejudice to think that nuts or breaking nuts would not be meaningful to an ape, in roughly the same way that things mean to humans.8 Even after this relativisation of the difference between humans and animals, we can observe big, radical differences. These differences concern, to be sure, also language. Third, the Heideggerian Mitsein can not produce a strict distinction between animals and humans (cases of Dasein) taking part in a particular Dasein. It is obvious that humans live in close and meaningful coexistence with domestic animals and pets. If and when humans can form lasting and reciprocal relations with animals then those animals take part in Dasein just as well as other potential non-human participants, such as demons or gods. The autonomous actions of animals that are to an extent understandable by humans—and vice versa; think, for example, of the uncanny ability of dogs to recognise human emotions and moods (Stimmung)—form a functioning circle of Mitsein where meaning is created and shared in the way described in Being and Time. Again, it is possible to claim that the co-existence of animals is in some sense dependent on humans, but no water-tight border can be drawn between human and animal meanings in the interaction. Happily, no such border is needed, either. At some point these kind of empirical discussions turn irrelevant and ridiculous, but the main point stands: a consistent Heideggerian philosophy can present a qualitative and gradual difference between humans and animals, but no absolute distinction. If an absolute boundary was possible and if that boundary was a necessary part of Heidegger’s philosophy, then his claim of the essential sameness of industrial agriculture and death camps would be impossible and Heidegger much closer to Žižek. But the absolute distinction is not possible and for the most part Heidegger is willing to emphasise the non-human elements in Dasein. * Significantly, Heidegger’s claim on death camps contains a symptomatic factual mistake. Literally translated, he says that industrial agriculture and the production of nuclear bombs is the same as production of corpses (Fabrikation vom Leichen) in the gas chambers. If a crude factuality is allowed, the purpose of the death camps was not to produce corpses. On the contrary, the huge amount of corpses was a problem for the camps. If the Nazis could have killed their victims without producing corpses things would have gone much smoother and swifter for them. The goal of the death 122

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camps was the mass murder of humans, the eradication of Jews and other unwanted populations, not the production of corpses. The goal was, more generally, a Jew-free (Judenrein) Germany (a goal that Heidegger does not comment on). The corpses and their huge amount were an obstacle on the road toward that goal. In his claim Heidegger either willingly or by mistake misunderstands the purpose of the death camps. The misunderstanding is produced by focusing exclusively on the aspect of technological domination. Of course, the infamous sentence constitutes just one small passage in a long and rich lecture on the essence of technology, but still the misunderstanding is symptomatic. Heidegger sees the production of corpses, not the loss of human lives. Moreover, he misses the further goal of getting rid of the piles of corpses, too. It is somewhat vexing that Heidegger who intended to draw our attention to the mystery of Being, to the divine and sacred wonderment over the fact that something rather than nothing exists, speaks of mass-murder and genocide materially, in terms of the production of corpses. Even though he is in his claim describing a view that he criticises, he does not comment on the humanity of the victims or the perpetrators—not here and not elsewhere. To defend Heidegger by saying that of course he saw in genocide also something else than the production of corpses and that it would be superfluous to mention such self-evident matters does not work, since the recognition of murder as murder by Heidegger is by no means obvious. Heidegger himself was very aware of the fact that he could be suspected of being blind towards the horrors. At the time of the Bremen lectures, Heidegger’s refusal to condemn the genocide was in the process of undermining his whole career and he was tormented by the question of how to keep his though available so that it would not be thrown out with Nazism and would not be buried under liberalism and Bolshevism (Petzet 1993, 48-53). Furthermore, Heidegger was just out of the investigation by the French denazification committee in Freiburg, so he had his defence strategy firmly in mind. In the name of consistency, the avenue of denying the value or relevance of public statements and public discussions is not open to Heidegger, either. For he laments how the “reality of the camps eludes the awareness of the world”: he is not talking about the Nazi death camps but of the POW camps in Soviet Russia (Heidegger & Blochmann 1998, 95). Both of Heidegger’s sons were on these camps. The unfortunate impression is that Heidegger is concerned over influencing public opinion when it suits his personal interests, but willing to despise it otherwise. Could Heidegger have said that industrial agriculture and the production of nuclear bombs is essentially the same as mass-murder (which also produces lots of corpses)? Maybe. This kind of claim can be derived from Heidegger’s view on technology. Heidegger sees as the problem the fact that through a technological understanding of Being humans start thinking of all beings, including themselves, as resources. To treat something as a resource and to experience something as a resource go for the soul as well as for the body. This form of the claim might have been more interesting since it would have pointed out a peculiarly European or modern characteristic of mass-murder. Premodern cultures have from time to time produced massive amounts 123

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of bodies in wars or after having destroyed essential natural resources. However, a meticulously planned, organised and implemented industrial mass-murder is unique to modern culture, if not else then because it demands a relatively advanced status of information technology, archives on population, medicine, legislation, logistics and other social technology. Mass-murder as the eradication of populations, as a phenomenon of purification, is a form of total mobilisation and therefore in Heideggerian terms genuinely European. It is good to remember that total mobilisation has both its subjectivistic and asubjectivistic (“Jüngerian”) forms. Therefore neither the propping up of the subject nor its dissolution are able to alone save us from total mobilisation and its horrors. The prevention or stopping of mass-murder or genocide does not, even in principle, happen on this level of abstraction. If Nazism and Stalinism as phenomena show something, then the fact that mass-murders are neither monocausal nor simple. Both the crimes of Nazism and the crimes of Stalinism were committed by different groups of people: by idealists convinced by the cause, cynics sheltered by the tumult, opportunists seeing an opening, ordinary family fathers not able to stand against what was normal, technocrats, sociopaths and so on. The only relatively certain way of diminishing the possibility of mass-murder and of limiting the reach of actual mass-murders is to give less power and resources to centralised and hierarchical (state) machineries. Both the state-fanatic Heidegger and the techno-optimist Žižek fail to consider this option. NOTES 1

2

3

4 5

6

The passage is included in Heidegger’s manuscript for the lecture, and has been quoted by Wolfgang Schirmacher in Technik und Gelassenheit (1983) to whom Thomas Sheehan refers in his article “Heidegger and the Nazis” (1988) that made the passage famous: “Ackerbau ist jetzt motorisierte Ernährungsindustrie, im Wesen das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Leichen in Gaskammern und Vernichtungslagern, das Selbe wie die Blockade und Aushungerung von Ländern, das Selbe wie die Fabrikation von Wasserstoffbomben.” The “blockading” is included in order to remind of the blockade of Berlin that was in effect when the lecture was given. Heidegger underwent one of the most dramatic crises of his life during 1946. One measure for the depth of the crisis is that he turned for help to the Catholic Church that he had earlier criticised in no uncertain terms (Heidegger 2005, 239ff; Safranski 1999, 371-372). At the very least Heidegger (2002, 36) wants to indicate that Gelassenheit is beyond both activity and passivity and therefore the highest form of action. Pages 63-64 of the Feldweggespräch essay (GA13, 37-74) discuss willing and the will. Heidegger’s essays on Hölderlin are a classic source on the “inhumanity” of truth, but already in the Gelassenheit essay, which is a memorial address for the composer Conradin Kreuzer, Heidegger writes that “From Conradin Kreuzer’s work we hear in these hours lied, folk songs, opera and chamber music. In these tones the composer is present. The presence of the master in the work is authentic. The greater the master, the more perfectly his person vanishes behind the work.” (GA16, 517). The same view on the severity and inhumanity of the way in which truth strikes humans is already evident in Heidegger’s letters in 1918—the letters, by the way, mention also Hölderlin (2005, 76-77, 83). “Hunderttausende sterben in Massen. Sterben sie? Sie kommen um. Sie werden umgelegt. Sterben sie? Sie werden Bestandstücke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen. Sterben sie? Sie werden in Vernichtungslagern unauffällig liquidiert. Und auch ohne Solches—Millionen verelenden jetzt in

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7

8

China durch den Hunger in ein Verenden. Sterben aber heisst, den Tod in sein Wesen austragen. Sterben können heisst, diesen Austrag vermögen. Wir vermögen es nur, wenn das Wesen des Todes unser Wesen mag.” (GA79, 56) Even though Heidegger seems to base some of his ideas on animals and biology on the intriguing and audacious theories by von Uexküll, his views on animals and the distinction beween animals and humans are rather run-of-the-mill. The animal and Eros are Heidegger’s most obvious Achilles’ heels, which should tell us something about his thinking on “the environment”. On a rudimentary symbolic function in animals see Arnold and Zuberbühler (2008), Arnold, Pohlner and Zuberbühler (2008). There exists also empirical evidence for self-consciousness in animals, such as their ability to recognise themselves in a mirror.

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The accounts Žižek gives on the act, the revolution and the subject all stand and fall together. In a revolutionary act he distinguishes between the non-historical, symbolic, repeatable form of the act and the concrete, perishable content. Likewise, the subject is a non-historical break in the symbolic. If one criticises Žižek’s account of revolution, one criticises his notion of the subject, and vice versa. This critique can have two aspects, a negative and a positive one. A negative critique of the notion of the subject points out, for instance, that Žižek moves too fast from drive to a universal subject, and that even as minimalist, the concept is still connected to colonialism. A positive critique would point out that the things Žižek wants to account for in phenomena like language, meaning and history are possible to describe without the notion of the universal subject. A part of the positive critique is, then, to show that language and human being are possible without the subject. In this part of the positive critique Heidegger is a good ally, since one of the most prominent features of his philosophical anthropology and philosophy of language is the theory of subjectless Being and life. In contrast to voluntarism, there is another feature in Žižek’s theory of revolution that is close to typical forms of Marxist determinism. He says that capitalism can not continue, because it runs into contradictions that are insoluble inside capitalism: There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. (2009a, 90) According to Žižek these problems can not be solved through reforms, therefore we need a revolution. Furthermore, he continues, the revolution should be called communistic for two reasons. First, because all of the four antagonisms are connected to the commons. Second, because the left has to be able to present a self-critique of Stalinism, among other things, that is more searching and deeper than the objections by the right. The content of communism is, in Žižek’s eyes, collective organisation outside the state and the markets. Like he himself notes, the demand for collective organisation beyond the state and the markets in order to resolve the deadlocks of capitalism is not particularly radical. Who would disagree on the need? Only the most hardened and deluded market fundamentalists believe in the capacity of free markets to solve all problems and the capacities of nation states are dismissed almost by everyone. 127

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As a consequence, maybe the most radical feature in Žižek’s theory is that he does not denounce revolutionary violence. Žižek (2008) separates two forms of violence: the subjective and the objective. Subjective violence is violence with a subject, a nameable individual, and typically also a nameable victim. Typically, the media is full of reports on subjective violence: robberies, rapes, murders, beatings with particular perpetrators and victims. Objective violence, in contrast, is the violence due to the economic and social structure of societies. This violence has no nameable individual subject, but still it kills people by hunger, disease, pollution, storms, bombs and so on. The numbers of the victims of objective violence are much higher and it produces much more suffering than subjective violence, but it is not reported diligently since it is a part of capitalism that one accepts by living in capitalism. The crystal clear position by Žižek is that subjective violence, for instance rioting or revolutionary terror, is acceptable if it succeeds in bringing down the levels of objective violence. The acceptance of violence is somewhat surprising in the contemporary philosophical climate, but Žižek’s argument for his position is not as such very controversial. Even mainstream liberal democratic thinking promotes “war for peace”, i.e., military operations the purpose of which is to use violence in order to prevent violence. This does not mean that because of the similarity of arguing for violence in order to reduce violence, the Žižekian position and the liberal democratic position would be commensurable. There is at least one decisive difference. The liberal violence is structurally directed from the top down (rich countries bombing poor countries, the owners and bosses exploiting workers, the police oppressing demonstrators) while the violence supported by Žižek must run in the opposite direction, from the lower levels of social and economic hierarchy to the higher levels (on top-down and bottom-up violence, see Graeber 2011, 48-52). When we make these two distinctions in forms of violence, subjective versus objective, top-down versus bottom up, we get a two-by-two categorisation. The kind of violence that Graeber and Žižek want to draw our attention to is the objective top-down violence, i.e., violence that oppresses the oppressed further as a consequence of the structures of capitalism (including the economy, private property, the police, the army, etc.) and its symbolic and ideological consequences (the higher value, admiration, and authority supposedly due to the higher levels of society). Objective top-down violence constantly humiliates, beats and directly kills people low in the economic and ideological hierarchy. Often, this violence is “invisible”. It is not noticed and even when it is commented upon, it is normalised, separated from politics, seen as a “natural” part of life; in a word, as a consequence of the way in which society simply “is”. Like Graeber notes, when the police beats up a demonstrator, things are as they should be and the situation is often not even recognised as violent. In contrast, violence from the bottom up, for instance, demonstrators demolishing windows or burning cars is labelled “terrorism” or some other form of evil, even when the violence is directed solely on property, not on humans. In order to diminish objective top-down violence, Žižek accepts the use of bottom-up violence at least in its 128

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objective form, i.e., when it tries and succeeds in changing the social and economic structure, and maybe also in its subjective form, i.e., as the violent explosion of a frustrated and oppressed subject against an overpowering enemy. Table 1. The Two-by-Two of Violence top-down

bottom-up

subjective

greedy bankers, crooked politicians, revenge against individual bosses, corrupt police, evil bosses, etc. oppressors, etc.

objective

exploitation, economic inequality, private property, etc.

revolution, ethical violence

Since Žižek himself mentions Gandhi in this context, an interesting comparison can be made. In a discussion with Paul Taylor,1 Žižek brings up his misunderstood claim that “Hitler was not violent enough” (2007a, 39). He clarifies that he meant that Hitler did not have courage enough to change the bourgeois and capitalist order. In other words, Hitler did not venture deep enough into objective bottom-up violence, and the Nazis ended up with the genocide of the Jews (a form of top-down violence) as a reaction to the political impasse. Žižek continues by saying that he supports the kind of violence in terms of which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: at least Gandhi tried to change the basic structures of both the British Empire as well as independent India. This is a clear argument for objective bottom-up violence. Despite having been a committed proponent of nonviolence, Gandhi himself accepted also subjective bottom-up violence.2 He emphasised that a nonviolent bottom-up struggle needs courage and self-knowledge, since top-down violence is in most cases much stronger and does not hesitate to act. In view of this, he concludes that if one does not have the courage of nonviolence, it is better to act violently—for instance, in resistance to an attacker—than to not act at all. This can be interpreted as an acceptance of subjective bottom-up violence or at least a non-condemnation of it. Even if subjective bottom-up violence is not, according to Gandhi, the most effective method (the most effective method being objective bottom-up nonviolence with the aim of changing structures, including structures inside individuals), it can be accepted because it upholds self-respect and independence. Žižek directs his critique to the overwhelming attention that so-called critical intellectuals give to subjective top-down violence. For instance, while discussing the financial crisis after 2008, they concentrate on greedy bankers and reckless loan takers and givers, as if the problem was the individual characteristics of the rich and wannabe-rich, and not the objective structure of monetary economy and capitalist profit-seeking. Likewise, in the war against terror, attention is concentrated on individuals and networks with names, instead of bringing up the reasons for terrorism, for instance, in geopolitics and politics of energy. Žižek’s main message is that the attention given to subjective violence in general and the liberal and leftist attention 129

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given to subjective top-down violence in particular (in terms of revealing and condemning corrupt rulers, conspiracies, immoral bankers) is always an ideological ruse that hides or at least forgets objective top-down violence. By revealing the unfairness, greed or misconduct of this or that business leader or politician, we get a moral boost without actually changing anything. We may even entertain the illusion that our system is good and open, since such revelations are possible. Moralism is the opium of the benevolent masses, and it must be done away with. The non-condemnation of violence is a part of Žižek’s bigger project to dismantle the concept of totalitarianism as a catch-all that covers everything from Plato to Nazism and Stalinism (the book Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, 2002a, is one of the most direct expressions of this endeavour). The liberalist condemnation of totalitarianism is, according to Žižek, a part of a capitalist ban on thinking, Denkverbot, the purpose of which is to make the recognition and realisation of alternatives impossible. Both liberalism and postmodernism label any form of taking one’s beliefs seriously fundamentalism, and think that such fundamentalism is only a step away from totalitarianism and terrorism. What is left is the reasonable and ironic acceptance of the prevailing structural violence in a liberal democracy. Against this, Žižek proposes that it may be both politically and ethically reasonable to take one’s beliefs seriously and to act on them, even violently. The ghost of totalitarianism should not stop us from taking this step. We saw above, how in “Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933”, Žižek wants to search for a Lacanian politics that is so far missing (also from Lacan himself). He delineates three forms of Lacanian politics, out of which the third is, according to him, the correct one (2007a, 4-9). Before these three genuinely political approaches Žižek mentions a kind of zero-level possibility: Lacan’s theory can in line with other psychoanalytic theories be seen as a means to investigate and analyse politics and ideology, its hidden and unawoved drives and flows, without any political messages of its own. This purely descriptive Lacan is not Žižek’s aim. He is looking for a more direct connection: what kind of political theory does Lacan’s theory contain or entail? The first option is to read from Lacan a straightforward defence of democracy. When Lacan’s theory shows that our acts have no ultimate guarantee and that the society is not a harmonious whole, we are left with a compilation of different views and goals, the co-existence of which needs a democratic process. The connection is even more precise. In a democracy, the positions of power are roles: there is a distinction, for instance, between the position and the person of the president. This distinction reproduces the Lacanian distinction between the symbolic (the empty place of power) and the real (the person occupying the place). In this sense, democracy institutionalises the imperfection of human politics which in many other theories is thought to be a problem. It is good that the person holding the position of power is not thought to be the source of that power and that the person occupying the position is changed every once in a while. In this way the imperfection of politics becomes a structural part of the political system. However, Žižek does not fully embrace this form of political Lacanism. The problem is that as a consequence politics turns into pure administration. 130

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The distinction between the role/position and the person means at the same time that individuals do not participate in politics as themselves with their quirks and passions, but as impersonal cogs of a bigger machine. This kind of democratic subject is always alienated. The same goes for the democratic system as a whole. It becomes a form of bureaucratic administration devoid of any kind of passions. Mutatis mutandis, this is close to Heidegger’s analysis: politics in the age of technological understanding of Being is forced to be an ever more efficient administration of resources, whether the parties or individuals taking part in politics want it or not. The second form of Lacanian politics proposes that we take this unfortunate paradox of democracy as administration seriously. Then the task of critical theory is that of a Socratic gadfly, forever provoking democracy from its complacency and dogmatism, stopping it from sliding into non-democracy.3 Like Žižek (2007a, 6) explains, this kind of Lacanian politics would function like vaccination. The purpose would be to inject in democracy from time to time an element of non-democracy so that it stays vigorous and resistant. Here the critic of democracy, the provocateur, is actually seeking for better democracy. Žižek sees several potential problems in this model. For instance, how real is the anti-democratic element? If it is not really genuine, it can not fulfil its function, and the situation collapses back to democracy as administration. On the other hand, if the anti-democracy is genuine, it can lead to the loss of democracy (for instance, if a Nietzschean critique is taken seriously and realised as a perverted Nazi version). Žižek can not accept the castration of a critique of democracy or of revolutionary thinking, in general, into a therapeutic provocation that is not supposed to be taken in earnest but is seen as a part of the public function of an intellectual as a lapdog of power. Therefore he wants to create a third form of Lacanian politics in which the aim is a “liveable society beyond democracy” (Žižek 2009, 9). The point is to go beyond liberal, representative democracy in practice, not only on the level of critique. What makes this overcoming of democracy Lacanian is its voluntarist nature. The revolution is not the terminus of a historically determined process nor the peak of an evolutionary ladder. Rather, it is a collective, disciplined and willed project for transforming human life—without any guarantees. Žižek’s way of combining Marx, Lacan and Hegel produces a view in which revolution is seen as a kind of collective Lacanian therapy through which the collective comes to realise and accept that the analyst (science, ideology, Marxism, Party, etc.) does not know (at least does not know better than the analysand; the authority that through transference has been given to the analyst collapses) and consequently starts acting on its own accord, in its concrete historical and material situation. Acting under one’s own responsibility naturally includes the project of creating a just and equal society as a conspicuously artificial creation (unlike what Žižek sees Heidegger attempting, as a return to a “natural” harmony or wisdom). The revolution is not based on an origin, on authenticity or wisdom, but on the ability of the collective to will and create something new. One consequence of the artificiality of the revolution is that it is a response to a particular historical situation. The revolution 131

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is universal on the symbolic plane, as the re-filling of the empty spaces left by failed revolutions, but concretely it proceeds by breaking the letter of the old revolutions and by changing the existing social, political and economic structures. Another universal dimension in a revolution is that in it a group of people with no part in society presents itself as a “concrete universal”, i.e., as a really existing group with all of its particularities that still embodies humanity as whole, demanding universal equality and justice. In a revolution, this group does not become the new ruling elite, but rather insist on universal rights for everyone and not only for themselves. Žižek sees that this artificiality of revolution separates his view from the “wrong” Heidegger. Like noted above, the later Heidegger has been interpreted as a precursor to ecological thinking in which the goal is to return to a humble and premodern respect for nature. For instance, in Astra Taylor’s documentary Examined Life (2008), Žižek (filmed at a garbage dump) decisively cuts all ties to this kind of “ecological holism”. He emphasises that instead of ecological wholes we need more distance: “We need more alienation from our life-world, as it were from our spontaneous nature. We should become more artificial.” The sentiment is based on the suspicion that everything “natural” and “original” is also something artificial that merely poses as natural, normalised, non-ideological. Therefore the countermove has to be an ever more self-conscious artificiality. Like Žižek often quips, if modernism and capitalism have cut our ties to Mother Nature, then thank God for modernism and capitalism! However, the claim aims further. Žižek suggests that the ecological crisis can be solved through a kind of Hegelian short-circuit in which the beauty and poetry sought in ecological thinking are found in waste itself. Again Žižek uses one of his favourite Hegelian themes: the “concrete universal” does not mean the sublimation of a concrete being into a heavenly ideal so that its faults and impurities (“waste”) are neglected. Rather, in the concrete universal the imperfect being is accepted as universal as such. In other words, Žižek is not looking for a model in which we separate ourselves from waste and aim for a “wasteless” society (“perfect recycling” or “sustainable growth”) which according to him would be an ideological illusion. Rather, he wants us to identify with our waste, to see in it the artificiality of our world, including its beauty and possibilities for poetic action, possibilities for the rearrangement of how things are done. All of this is clearly connected with Žižek’s robust belief in technology. For him, technology is not something that humans can not control, but rather something to be controlled and utilised better. And what would be a better candidate for the position of the controller than the universalised collective of adult subjects? Even though Žižek is clear and strict in his ruthless criticism of liberalism and in his support for technology and violence, there is still a strangely opaque patch in the heart of his thinking. Maybe the opaqueness can be better described as a seesaw that can be teased into visibility by analysing the notion of the minimal subject from two opposing directions. At least since Husserl we know that the subject is always biased towards Europe, towards permanence and predictability. Of course the Lacanian subject does not imply the same kind of predictability and permanence 132

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as the Kantian or the Cartesian subject, but it still contains the parallel processes of Europeanisation and maturation (which, in a self-referential way, means a realisation and acceptance of the universality of the minimal subject). The task of the subject, however minimal, is to persist: the subject—rightly understood, rightly understanding itself—can not hope for self-destruction. Does not Žižek’s subject perform—however minimally—the same kind of colonialist task as the Husserlian one? And is not this performance vulnerable to the kind of critique that Heidegger presented towards the Husserlian subject? From the opposite angle we can ask is the minimalist subject able to perform the work it is supposed to do? Can it differentiate between the October revolution and the Nazi revolution? More crucially, can it act as the foundation for a revolution, i.e., can it show why a revolution should be done? The same double analysis can be directed to the notion of revolution. The separation between the form and the content of the revolution is supposed to make possible a reasoned distinction between the Bolshevist and National Socialist revolutions. But is not the distinction contained already in the separation itself? How could the form of the revolution be identified without any attention to the content? And if some features of the content need to be analysed in order to detect the form, does not the separation get muddled? Crudely put: if we criticise Žižek of too much formalism, of reliance on a non-historical form that is not able to differentiate between real revolutions, he points out the differences in content. If on the other hand one notices similarities in the content, Žižek insists that only one of the revolutions has the right kind of form. Žižek’s view is in a superposition, collapsing to either end as circumstances dictate. There is always either the problem of the lack of empirical precision in the formal and non-historical part, or then the non-absoluteness and relative nature of the historical and empirical view. It is important to notice how the opaque patch is included in the very separation between form and content. The separation should be crisp and absolute, fully rational. However, when the separation is applied on real revolutions, we need to attend to the content in order to see the form, and vice versa. What, for instance, is the content of the October revolution, as separate from its form? In his text “The Violent Silence of a New Beginning” (2011a) directed to the Occupy movement, Žižek first praises the movement for having created a new political field that the powers that be have not been able to neutralise, largely because the movement has not presented “realistic” demands. However, he continues by saying that in order to be truly revolutionary the movement must present one unified demand that is at the same time particular and universal, realistic and completely impossible: “a particular demand that while thoroughly ‘realistic’ also disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology, i.e. which, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the United States was such a case).” So, what was this demand in the case of the October revolution and the Bolsheviks? There is no easy answer. The Czar was already gone and as Žižek (2007b) notes, from February to October Russia was one of the most democratic states in Europe. Was the demand “All power to the soviets”? Hardly, since that was essentially a 133

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Menshevik slogan against which many Bolsheviks had serious reservations. Were there several overlapping demands? If there were, what exactly is the role of the Hegelian gesture of the “universal particular”? The October revolutionaries did not need it, but Žižek does. If revolutions combine several demands, what, in the end, is their “content” and what their “form”? Is that something decided after the fact by theoreticians like Žižek? The separation between form and content only registers the fact that the content is already judged to be of a particular kind (the October revolution is correct, the Nazi revolution is not). As such, it adds nothing to the analysis. If there is no presupposed separation, we have to empirically address both the content and the form, and here the detection of the form is possible only as a hypostasis of something contentful. In other words, the supposedly pure and structural separation between form and content reveals its umbilical cord: the separation is connected to a wish or a belief that revolutions fall neatly into right and wrong ones. The separation is fed by the need to cut through the Gordian knot of revolutions: how to make impossible the post-revolutionary horrors and how to, at least, save the face of some revolutions that have led to murderous dictatorships. This mission to save the October revolution is inscribed in the separation between form and content, as the concrete twist that muddles its supposedly clear and distinct structural nature. Let us return to the core question, that of the subject. Žižek is well aware of the critiques against philosophies of the subject. If we start criticising his theory as a form of traditional philosophy of the subject which makes claims about the necessary contents, capacities or properties of subject, Žižek retreats to the minimalist position, where the subject is nothing but the name for the structural fact that no contentful subject exists. The problem here is that this kind of purely structural subject gives precious little reason for revolutions, in general, and even less for leftist revolutions, in particular. If the ground for revolution is becoming adult in the sense that one recognises the empty position of the subject while at the same time accepting the absence of ultimate guarantees, we are only one millimetre away from the kind of decisionist politics advocated by Carl Schmitt. No right-left distinction is possible on the basis of this kind of minimalist subject, and decisionism merely codifies the disappearance of the coordinates. On the other hand, if we accuse Žižek’s theory of decisionism of this kind, he pulls himself to the other end of the see-saw, and declares that he is openly Europocentric and techno-optimist. Through this position, it is possible to smuggle an enormous amount of unawoved beliefs on the nature of Europe and technology inside the idea of revolution. At the same time, one actively tries to forget the Heideggerian or post-colonist or postmodern criticisms of Europocentrism. Thomas Brockelmann (2008, 118) describes the phenomenon I have called the see-saw by distinguishing between two concepts of the subject in Žižek. First, there is the “dimensional”, non-historical subject that is born out of the structure of the theory itself. Second, there is the historical subject of work. Like Brockelmann points out, this doubleness might very well be the source of the illuminative 134

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power in Žižek’s analyses of revolution. At the same time, it creates the see-saw: the second subject gives arguments for a leftist and Enlightenment revolution, and the first subject evades the Heideggerian, Foucaultian and other kinds of criticism. The see-saw is a source of great frustration for Žižek’s critics, but maybe it is not too fatal for the theory itself.4 However, the real problem is how the duplicity of the subject once again smuggles an European (Enlightenment humanism) view of what it means to be human into the supposedly universal and non-historical account of revolution. Heidegger’s revolution was intended as a countermove against this smuggling. The point was to be explicitly European, not universalistic and not European-masquerading-as-Universalist. Heidegger’s philosophy is not universalist and neither is his revolution. It is not for everyone, for instance, not for freefloating separate individuals, and maybe it therefore does not merit the name of revolution, if we define revolutions as something necessarily universal. In contrast, Žižek’s revolution is either universalist-minimalist (with pure form, no content) or Eurocentric (smuggling European values inside supposedly universal structures). The irony is that the voluntaristic and semi-decisionist Žižek advocating for a leftist revolution has relatively little to say on how the revolution should be made, while the semi-voluntarist and anti-decisionist Heidegger derived the content of the revolution directly from the task of the Greco-German Dasein to will itself and to realise its potential through labour rooted in the existential tasks of the people. Consequently, what we lack is not so much a comprehensive theory of Stalinism, but rather a communistic Heidegger. In his contentful and anti-individualist revolution Heidegger actually gives us more freedoms than Žižek in his universalistic and structural revolution. How so? Heidegger claims that, for instance, the problem of technology can be thought only in German (with its essential connections to classical Greek). If this is the case, the problem of technology is something that we who do not speak German as our mother tongue can not hope to understand, let alone solve.5 However, at the same time Heidegger’s view implies that there may be some other problems, possibly some other areas of thinking, that are accessible to people who speak some other language than German. If the technological understanding of Being can be creatively re-experienced intensively enough only in Greek-German, it is possible that other areas of linguistic experience present other problems and possibilities for thought. In contrast to this, Žižek’s universalist revolution gives only one possibility for emancipation and becoming adult; a possibility that is the same for us all. It does not help to say that what Žižek means is that only adulthood opens the door for true individuality with endless possibilities, since if that is the case, then we again fall back to pure decisionism. At the very least, Heidegger indicates that we (even non-Germans) may have genuine problems to think about, while Žižek proposes the application of a universal solution. Let us, then, set Žižek in the middle of the see-saw and ask him to make his choice for once and for all: either the subject is minimalist, in which case its relation to things like technology and communism is purely decisionist, or the subject 135

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contains an Europocentric tendency, in which case it falls prey to the postcolonial and postmodern criticisms. The minimalist subject may be minimally revolutionary, but not in a way that says anything about the direction of the revolution in terms of the left, right, and so on. The only way of expressing these two accounts of subject together is to be inconsistent and to produce confusion that does not honour the best traditions of the Enlightenment.6 Keeping the two together is bad dialectics: even though the two concepts together fruitfully illuminate several phenomena from their parallel perspectives, their superposition obfuscates the crucial question: why a revolution? It is possible to present a somewhat Žižekian criticism of Žižek’s notion of the subject. The best—almost enticing—part of Žižek’s theory of the subject is that the subject is another name for the fact that the ontological field is broken and finite, and that this brokenness and finitude are the conditions of possibility for the world to exist. There is nothing in this that could not, in principle, be accepted from an anti-metaphysical or asubjectivist viewpoint. The name for the finitude and the brokenness could be something else, so there is no point in quarrelling just over the term “subject”. To say that the ontological field is broken and that this break is a condition for its existence is not, as such, a subjectivistic position. It is made into a form of the metaphysics of subjectivity (and Europocentric colonialism) by the concrete “twist” given to it. Moreover: like Fascism borrows forms of collective discipline from the leftist labour movement and gives them a wrong twist, Žižek also borrows the finitude and brokenness from the asubjectivist tradition, more particularly from Heidegger. What is the concrete twist given to finitude by Žižek? To base the possibility of meaning on finitude, brokenness and imperfection is common to Žižek and Heidegger. The difference is fairly simple and predictable: for Heidegger meaning is historical and local, for Žižek at least potentially universal and commensurable. But how is this possible? Does not the finitude of the ontological make meaning necessarily historical, temporal, and is this temporalisation of Being not something that Žižek accepts from Heidegger? This is precisely the place where Žižek’s notion of the subject reveals its concrete twist. The minimal subject is supposed to perform like Baron von Münchhausen, and to lift itself up by its bootstraps from finitude into universalism. The subject is a name given to finitude; a name that is supposed to give back universality to the sphere of meaning (and not only to particular meanings but to meaning überhaupt), even though no such universality exists in the ontological as such. In this task, Žižek’s subject has the same function as the subjects described by Descartes or Husserl, both of which are also supposed to anchor universal and commensurable meaning. The main difference is that for Žižek the subject is not the ground of meaning, but rather a condition of possibility for meaning. Žižek raises the stakes, because he accepts the possibility that the subject may not be able to create universal meaning. It may not always be able to become an adult, unlike the subjects of Descartes or Husserl, which are always already fully formed even if not necessarily fully realised. 136

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Even this raising of the stakes can still be combined with a critique of metaphysics. The idea that it is possible to create universal subjects (i.e., subjects that experience themselves and present themselves as universal) is compatible with Heidegger’s theory and with asubjectivism in general. Finally, the step that an asubjectivist can not take with Žižek is ethico-political: according to Žižek, becoming a subject in the European sense (meaning Enlightenment universality) is not only good as such but the only possible avenue of progress for an individual. Already Heidegger disagreed strongly with this (for him Europeanness was defined by Greek agonism with the Asiatic) and we have even more reasons to be sceptical. One of Heidegger’s characteristic moves—one that Foucault later develops into an art—is to ask with regard to any philosophical concept or claim what kind of work does the concept do, how is it materialised in the world, what does it mean in terms of human practices and lives. This basic move has its reverse, because the relationship between a concept and human practices is a genuine chicken and egg relationship. From what kind of life and what kind of practices does a given concept emerge as a relatively permanent crystallisation? We have to ask this question with regard to Žižek’s concept of the subject. What practices or forms of life produce the minimalistic or empty concept of the subject? Or, in reverse, what work does the concept of the empty subject perform in Žižek’s theory, for instance in his political theory? Like we saw above, the main task of the subject is to make the field of meaning at least potentially commensurable and universal. The subject makes possible the critique of ideology, it makes possible to analyse the art, religion and culture of all times and places as symptoms of one and the same psychoanalytic structure, as if humans could only have problems and goals that are already wellknown in Paris. No genuinely incommensurable meaning can be encountered in the world structured by the empty subject. Žižek himself is well aware of this implicit claim of commensurability (and translatability) and uses it as a politically incorrect provocation while mocking non-European and pre-modern ideas. The forced commensurability characterises also Žižek’s caricature description of premodern life and wisdom. It is certainly true that many pre-modern wisdom traditions thought that the universe was ultimately in balance or even in harmony, and that the task of humans was to find their place in this whole. It is also true that many non-European and pre-modern cultures have found an ecologically sustainable lifestyle partly on the basis of such a belief. But is this really true of all pre-modern or non-European ways of life? Isn’t it at least possible to imagine a non-European community which thinks that the universe is finite, filled with tension and struggle, and believes that humans have no fixed place in it, and which still isn’t in a rush to Europeanise itself? And could not such a community exist not only as a pre-modern fossil, but as an actuality, maybe also something that is born after modernism? The most unfortunate task of the concrete twist given to the notion of the subject is that it makes the theory overly simplified and blind towards the empirical world. This should be no surprise, since the subject is a structure of commensurability, translatability and standardisation (not, for example, of pluralisation, diversification, 137

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nomadisation and so on). There are pre- and anti-modern world-views, philosophies, cultures and traditions that do not imagine the ontological to be harmonious. There are, for instance, traditional cultures whose view of man and nature (even according to scientific anthropological descriptions) corresponds well with the Heideggerian account of the finitude and mortality of Dasein, of the groundless ground in the contradictory and even vehement struggle in Being itself. The job of European philosophies of the subject, like Žižek’s, is to cover up these empirical and experiential possibilities and to claim that everything premodern and non-European is primitive and immature. Here Žižek’s concept of the empty subject contains much more than it is ready to admit. Or, again, in reverse: if the universal subject is the form that is left when all particular content has been subtracted, what can the subject add to what a collective as physical and empirical people can do? Žižek’s answer to the problems of Europeanness (capitalism, environmental disasters, inequality and so on) is more and better Europeanness. Here he returns to the second form of Lacanian politics. Like democracy needs to be vaccinated by a dose of anti-democracy, leading to a better democracy (democracy is saved by deMOREcracy, 2007a, 8), Europe must be cured by a therapeutic dose of antiEurope (in Žižek’s case totalitarianism) leading to a better Europe. Let us perform a Žižek on Žižek, and demand a third form of politics, a liveable non-European way of life as a collective and voluntary non-harmonious project. NOTES 1

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Paul Taylor & Slavoj Žižek, “Screening Thought”, ICA London 4.5. 2011, http://www.egs.edu/ faculty/slavoj-Žižek/videos/screening-thought/ For instance: “A non-violent man or woman will and should die without retaliation, anger or malice, in self-defense or in defending the honour of their womenfolk. This is the highest form of bravery. If an individual or group of people are unable or unwilling to follow this great law of life, retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence worse than violence.” (1999, 143) Maybe Lacan’s famous quip to the rebels of 1968: “As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!” can be seen from this perspective. Žižek does not claim that Lacan would have been an example of Lacanian politics in the sense that he describes. But see Vadén (2008). The situation is even more hopeless. Not only are those who do not learn German early and deeply enough unable to solve the problem of technology, they can not even experience what the problem is. Those too far removed from the creative re-experiencing of the Greek origin of technology are not even capable of asking the question with regard to technology. To put the matter in Žižekian terms, we who are removed from the Greco-German linguistic axis, can not get close enough to the spirit (of Greco-German experience of technology) in order to break the letter (the technological world). The see-saw is detectable also in Žižek’s way of commenting on contemporary political events. At one moment he can claim to be commonsensical and realistic, modestly proposing that we need collective action outside markets and the state in order to solve some problems in capitalism. Well, nearly everyone agrees. The next moment he is calling this collective action communism, and making jokes about Stalinism and sending comrades to camps for rehabilitation.

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Žižek›s theory of the subject is a step back from Heidegger with regard to Europeanness (i.e., colonialism), but it is still an important corrective. In all his love for the homeland, the emphasis on community and sensitivity towards language, Heidegger neglects some of the political aspects of Dasein. Likewise, he misses the artificiality of his own account of the origin and its essence. Heidegger›s view on the relationship between German and Greek languages and the basic experiences contained in them, and his view on the origin of Europe in classic Greece is powerful and convincing, but at the same time it is something that Heidegger learned from elsewhere, something artificial, thoughtlessly reproduced, shot through with vested interests—in a word, ideological. A kind of “smoking gun” with regard to the artificiality and ideological nature of Heidegger’s view on the Greek origin is his short travel book Aufenthalte (1989). Maybe one of the most moving and simultaneously most suspect passages of the book is Heidegger’s description of the visit on Delos. Heidegger tells how his doubts over whether Greece in general and the Greece of the 1960’s in particular could in any meaningful way relate to his philosophical thinking on the Greek origin almost stopped him from venturing on the trip altogether. These doubts persist during the voyage itself, and reach their highest level when the boat carrying the travellers is approaching Delos. Heidegger starts to have second thoughts: what if his view of the essence of the Greek origin as aletheia is just an invention, with no basis in the Greek world? However, to his joy Heidegger (1989, no page numbers) discovers that Delos confirms his view that the essence of Greekness is the “unconcealed “ where the acts of humans get their place in view of the Gods and where thinking becomes a gathering in thanking. It is beautiful that Heidegger can in this almost shamanistic way read the essence of a whole historic period out of the geography and cultural remains on Delos. At the same time is its clear that the essence that Heidegger reveals is only one of the sacred possibilities gathered at Delos, and that his account of the core of the Greco-German Europeanness leaves other aspects of Delos aside. Just one example. Like noted above, while describing the essence of Greekness, Heidegger writes that the Greeks get from Asia a “dark fire”. A dark fire from the East and the rhythm of tragedy that sets form to it—this is Heidegger’s view of the Greek world, like it already was for Nietzsche. But isn’t it possible that the Greeks defined by “severe agonism” had ample amounts of “dark fire” to begin with, and that the impetus for organising the dark fire through logos originated from 139

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Eastern traditions of wisdom? Why shouldn’t we see Heraclitus the Obscure, who foreswore his highborn status and lived in a cave on Ephesus (in modern Turkey), observing that “Here too the gods are present”, as a part of a long and vital tradition of Asian cave-mystics and ascetics? Does not Socrates endeavour to direct his dark fire by consulting wisdom from a cave? Does not Plato’s overflowing cup borrow guidelines from the gymnosophists of the East? Of course Heidegger would not deny that the Greek origin of Europe is born in antagonism with the Asiatic and that in this sense there is a healthy dose of the East in Heraclitus. But what if Heraclitus’ attempt to experience the alethetic process inside the cosmic fire, the attempt to understand the directive power of the lightning is part of his Asiatic heritage, rather than of the Apollonian Greek rhythm?1 (And what if the distinction between the Asiatic and the Western, really, makes no sense?) It is true that an overemphasis on an organising and theoretical reason sounds like a uniquely Greek trait, but this does not mean that the idea that the dark fire can be reorganised through certain types of exercises (of reason, of language) could not have come to Greece from Asia. The obsessive overemphasis on theory may also be a sign of a surplus of dark fire. So we should omit from Heidegger’s revolution its tendency towards purification, of purifying origins from aspects that he sees as unfit. The problem with Heidegger is not his budding shamanism, but the utilisation of those forces in the service of a hierarchical and murderous state. It is by no means clear that a purified Greekness can, in the first place, be combined with a thinking that tries to remember the role of Being (i.e., Nothing) in European history. In contrast, we can take from Heidegger’s revolution the emphasis on thinking beyond philosophy narrowly understood, its pre-theoretical intensity (i.e., its origin and return in the ontic, in life as the task and place of thinking), its emphasis on experience, community, and history. The same elements can be found in Žižek, albeit expressed in different words: philosophy is a collective and historical attempt to live in a different way. In addition, we should take from Žižek his basic attitude towards Heideggerian hubris: philosophical text or speech does not contain “the thing itself”—not even text or speech by Heidegger or Heraclitus—and it should not be elevated into an object of worship. Philosophical text or speech in rebellion is the stratification of shards from lived experiments that should be reutilised and reactivated, not revered. The best supplement to Heidegger’s and Žižek’s thinking is provided by what remains unthought-of by both of them, namely non-Europeanness. Both neglect areas of Europeanness, even though many idols are clashed, and both leave the virulently non-European unexplored, even though exotic avenues are ventured at. Both think against liberalism and individualism. In addition, Žižek thinks against capitalism and Heidegger against universalism. But both fail to think against (European) notions of the state and against the division of labour in service of the state.2 Therefore the “communist Heidegger” must be sought among the re-experiencing of the questions of state and labour. We do not only need a Heidegger corrected by Žižek but even more acutely a Heidegger avec Means.

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The idea is simple. Let us begin with the first antagonism of capitalism mentioned by Žižek, ecological crises. European modernism can not present a single example of a way of life that would not destroy its environmental surroundings, not a single “sustainable” economic system. In contrast, there are several examples of nonEuropean and non-modern ways of life (“indigenous cultures”) that have co-existed with their natural surroundings for centuries without destroying them. We do not have to claim that most or even that many non-European or premodern ways of life have been like that—certainly many have destroyed nature and often themselves in the process. However, even one example of sustained non-destructive life is enough to show that something that is impossible (at least so far) for modern Europe and the West, is humanly possible. In fact, there are several such examples, and sometimes—not always—these ecologically sustainable non-European ways of life are also socially and economically more equal than anything Europe has to show for itself. To live without destroying nature and without oppressing other humans as much as is customary in modern Europe is possible, even though Europe, capitalism, socialism and modernism have already obliterated most of the possibilities for nonEuropean life. If this is the historical situation, why would we not seek ways out of the dead-end of modernism and Europe also outside Europe? Heidegger’s answer to this question is interesting: the problem of technology can be creatively re-experienced and thereby overcome only in a cultural (linguistic, experiential, spiritual) sphere that is close enough to the Greek culture in which the phenomenon of technology was born. Heidegger’s answer means also that outside the German cultural sphere one has to concentrate on other problems. This can be interpreted also in the sense that outside the Greco-German-Europeanness, in the margins of Europe, the overcoming of contemporary crises can and should be sought from non-European cultural impulses. Žižek’s answer to the question is more ordinary and somewhat clumsy. For him the European cultural resources and forces represent the highest form of a universally commensurable evolution, and even if this evolution is taking us to hell, the activation of other types of resources does not help, since the very first task for these resources is to be Europeanised. To borrow an expression from himself, this move by Žižek can be called “a flight forward”. We can escape the dead-end that is Europe only by accelerating the best European forces (science without illusions, critical psychoanalysis and philosophy, progressive collective politics) into ever faster development and deeper deployment. But what are the empirical or theoretical grounds for believing that the “flight forward” is the best or even a possible way out of the dead-end? In his theory, Žižek does not address the circle of subjectivity as a condition of thought and knowledge. This makes the “illusionlessness” and criticality of science and philosophy unattainable. Empirically, the flight forward is a leap of faith, based on the hope that for once a European revolution would stall or even postpone destruction instead of hastening it. Of course such success is possible. However, there are reasons for doubting the success, reasons other than the pessimism generated by previous 141

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examples. The Lakota leader Russell Means has presented the following rule of thumb (1980): You cannot judge the real nature of a revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effect it will have on non-European peoples. The sentence is presented in the context of the American Indian struggle for independence that was renewed after the 1960’s, and its main target is Marxism. Here, as often elsewhere, Marxism presents itself as the first tool of analysis and strategy, simply because it has provided the most detailed and deepest analyses of capitalism and has often successfully allied itself with independence movements that reject capitalist modernism. Despite this, it is obvious that Marxism has not been able to stop the extermination and extinction of non-European ways of life. Marxism has also been a part of several initiatives that have actively destroyed non-European ways of life. For instance, the consequences of the October revolution are disastrous for several indigenous peoples, in some cases terminally. However, there are some promising developments early on in the October revolution (such as emphasis on native languages), so we should use Means’ rule of thumb case by case and ask: what does the correction presented by Žižek to Heidegger’s revolution promise for indigenous peoples? Not much. Just maturation in terms of European science and philosophy. Maybe Žižek could reply that at the moment there exists only European structures of power (global capitalism) and therefore a European endeavour (global revolution) is necessary so that non-European ways of life would be possible in the first place. It is true that global capitalism and non-European life are incompatible. In this sense it is necessary that global capitalism be dismantled. But it is not clear that this is enough. Even less clear is why the overthrow of global capitalism in the name of illusionless science, critical thought and progressive politics would be good for non-European ways of life. It is not very likely that the intensification and promotion of (quite narrowly understood) European excellence (Hegel, Lacan, Marx) would provide room and life-blood for non-European cultures. In contrast to Žižek, Heidegger’s thinking contains elements that suggest that different kinds of Dasein and different cultures (as linguistic, experiential, and spiritual wholes) have access to genuinely incommensurable layers and kinds of meaning. Heidegger does not deny the possibility that a non-European tradition of though might be a part of how the end of the world is avoided (even though that would not save Europe as Europe). Ironically, Žižek, who insists on equality and universalism, is more harsh towards non-European systems of meaning than Heidegger, who is nationalist and elitist. In the history of European philosophy and thought there are precious few schools or views that would assign genuine (that is, non-therapeutic or non-decorative) import to non-European thought. Therefore Heidegger›s account on the temporality and locality of Being is noteworthy, even though Heidegger himself never seriously questioned the superiority of Europe. 142

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Means’ rule of thumb reveals interesting aspects in Heidegger’s revolution. Like Heidegger, “really existing Nazism” took the differences between different kinds of Dasein seriously, up to the point of serious internal fighting over the nature (and kinds) of German Dasein and the Aryan race (e.g., the “Nordics” against the “Germanics/ Volkists”). Heidegger himself also had his preferences, repeatedly remarking on the special qualities of the Schwabians. But the Nazi revolution was not beneficial to indigenous peoples or to non-European ways of life (not in the sense that the Nazis understood “Europe” and not in the sense the term “indigenous people” is used today). If the Third Reich had won the war, it is not very likely that it would have allowed any kind of non-decorous non-Europeanness on its lands. In general, National Socialist thought on the relationship between other nationalities and the German national awakening and on the need for non-German national awakenings was contradictory, shifting and inconclusive, which was also intermittently evident in their international action (see Mazower 2009). However, like other European revolutions, the National Socialist revolution was, overall, bad news for both nonEuropean ways of life and to plurality within Europe. What if we move Heidegger’s revolution further away from “really existing Nazism”? Since different kinds of Dasein have, according to Heidegger, different understandings of Being and consequently different worlds, Heidegger has no urgent need to deny the value of non-European ways of life and understandings of Being. Neither does he present calls for universal Europeanisation. In fact, in Heidegger’s view universal Europeanisation (Greco-Germanisation) is impossible, since one becomes European by living in Europe and speaking a European language since childhood. Europeanising oneself in adulthood leads, according to Heidegger, to enraciment and loss of creativity, because the existential problems of the situation do not present themselves in the mode of emergency (Not). Consequently, Heidegger can not without reservations advocate the Europeanisation of non-European or indigenous cultures. It is unclear what would have happened to non-European (following Heidegger, let us say, for instance, the Russian) and indigenous peoples if a uniquely Heideggerian rather than “really existing National Socialist” revolution would have won in Germany and Europe. Would Heidegger or a Heideggerian Führer have thought that the weaker peoples and their worlds will have to give way to the stronger one? This kind of acceptance or normalisation of what happens on the basis of existing power constellations can be read between the lines of Heidegger’s texts. Be that as it may, the decisive fact has been discussed already. For Heidegger, the state is the highest form and highest goal of a people. Without the rank and leadership in a state, and without the centre of the state gathered through poetic art, thought and politics, human life and especially human labour is, according to Heidegger, without history and incomplete. Therefore Heidegger calls aggregations of stateless humans groups and not peoples. Heidegger is right: not all humans form states and, consequently, not all humans have a history in Heidegger’s sense of the word. To modify Means’ rule of thumb, we could ask what kind of consequences, according 143

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to Heidegger, would a successful revolution have on these groups? And what, if any, contribution could the groups have in overcoming the dead-end of Europe? The act gathering the logos in the centre of the state is a unitary whole combining religious, artistic and political elements. As Rickey (2002) observes, at different times Heidegger emphasises different aspects of the whole—sometimes talking of the acts of the politician, sometimes of the words of the poet, sometimes of the sacrifice of the soldier—but always the state and the people it organises are focal. Crudely put, the greatness of a people is for Heidegger in its ability to follow a leader in a shared understanding of Being. In the midst of struggle and confrontation, Heidegger’s view of the state and the people is centripetal and unificatory, not centrifugal or pluralising. The centre of the polis is in some way holy or sacred. Through the sacred, the divine may appear. Thus the centre is able to give measure to human action. Heidegger does not hope for a theistic God, or for a religious state along the lines of the Islamic Caliphate. Rather, his goal is the breaking down of the barriers between religion, art and politics, and the grounding of communal life in the unified experience. The later Heidegger often speaks about gods in the plural in order to keep his distance from theistic Christianity. Unfortunately the talk of gods in plural does not mean that Heidegger would have given up on the necessary centripetalness of a people. The anti-pluralistic nature of the thought of the later Heidegger is most clearly evident in Aufenthalte (1989). From the polytheistic world of the Greeks Heidegger recognises a central goddess, Aphaia ( φαία), whose role is to protect aletheia. Since the temple of Aphaia is one of the oldest in classical Greece, Heidegger believes that it is aletheia that gives the Greeks their characteristic world, which still steers Europe as a origin. Heidegger writes that the alethetic relation to the world gave form to the Greeks and did not let them slide into “an indefinite pantheism” (“in einen unbestimmbaren Pantheismus verschwimmen”, 1989, no page numbers). It sounds like polytheism would, after all, have been a disappointment for Heidegger, also a betrayal of the Greek-European beginning. However, it is not without significance that the salvation from unclarified polytheism at least comes through a goddess rather than through a god. The Heidegger of the 1930’s was extremely state-centric, almost mono-polist (only Germany can save Europe). The state, in turn, was for him extremely centralised (“The Führer alone is German reality.”) Žižek’s praise for the best phase of Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930’s is directly related to this state-centrism that implies a closeness to the mono-polisticness upheld by the subject that Žižek wants to rehabilitate. The answer is, then, that Heidegger’s though might have opened paths towards plurality and centrifugal forces, but he himself always preferred centripetalism, also in his later work. Therefore his thought may be used in combination with non-European layers of meaning only with due care. For Žižek, Heidegger’s solution to the “worker question”, the birth of the proletariat, is wrong because it aims at pacifying the workers by giving them a national task without changing the structures of ownership. Heidegger would reply that changes 144

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in the structure of ownership may be needed up to point, but that this change must be secondary and subordinate to the more important task which is the rejuvenation of the German spiritual essence. Here matters of generation or age (“only the youth can save us”) and of contact with the elements (farmers, soldiers, workers in general) are more decisive for Heidegger than the question of the ownership of the means of production. Heidegger wanted to give more spiritual and political prominence and power to groups that did not have it (people working the earth, youth, the non-cosmopolitan creative artists) and take it away from groups that had it (international financial and economic elite, the Catholic church3, liberal university professionals). His personal political activity in the Gleichshaltung was directed at these goals. Consequently, Heidegger can not be accused of completely neglecting the questions of power and ownership. However, the term Gleichshaltung itself tells what Heidegger’s politics shared with official Nazism: the centralisation of German political and spiritual life. For Heidegger, the purpose of Nazism as a movement was to find forces that are able to unify politics and the sacred and that therefore are able to cut through the cobwebs of monetary economy and technological production. Heidegger thinks that National Socialism is an experience that is able to transform the collective understanding of Being in a way that transcends calculative utilitarianism. Moreover, Heidegger’s view of Hitler as the reality of German Being is a paradigmatic example of the kind of charismatic, erotic and asubjective sacred power that is able to create new worlds.4 However, both the National Socialist movement and Heidegger’s theory reduce this unpredictable and uncalculative (in Bataille’s terms, sovereign) force into the service of the centre and of a single voice. Even while both are willing to use non-subjective and demonic forces in breaking the bourgeois order and starting something new, they quickly want to channel the rebellious forces through the shining example in the centre of the polis and finally to tie them to a strict hierarchy of a leader and followers. They intend to unify all forces to a national enterprise with laser-like focus. It is not clear whether demonic forces ever are amenable to such channelling and unification. It is quite likely that they will produce unpredictable and uncontrollable phenomena despite having been crushed under the umbrella of “ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer.” The problem with Heidegger’s politics and the National Socialist revolution is that they try to make all non-utilitarian and non-controllable forces and elements serve a single command. Nazism and Heidegger do not endeavour to multiply rebellious forces against the organised society; they are not even willing to foster several such forces. In really existing Nazism this is obvious. The sovereignty or command crystallizing in Hitler originated partly from demonic, incalculable and sacred experiences, and needed these elements in shattering bourgeois complacency and utilitarian order, but it did not favour heterogeneous elements. Rather, it started a process of homogenisation, building a new authoritarian and hierarchical order. Even though the leader-follower structure always includes an erotic component, the Nazis were not particularly tolerant towards the erotic in either its physical or artistic forms. The same goes for Heidegger, who on a personal level was very dependent on the erotic and aware of the connection between his creativity and his erotic life,5 145

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but who found no way for publicly addressing the erotic, in general. Heidegger was negative if not downright hostile towards many non-bourgeois forms of sociality (the brutal sexuality in Berlin, urban life in general), also towards some forms of Nazi-inspired non-bourgeoisness (uncivilized and untargeted use of violence). His attempt to use Hegel as a basis for the education of a future Nazi elite in 1933 is noteworthy.6 By developing a Hegelian Greco-German state philosophy for National Socialism, Heidegger tried to solve the contradiction between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies: how to combine the demonic and non-individual Nazi power with the state without resorting to pseudo-biological racial thinking or to some other form of technologism? Heidegger believed the answer was to be found in the shining logos-centre of the polis which gives meaning and direction to all human endeavour and directs the nation into unity through leadership. The Hegelian freedom found in labour was, according to Heidegger, a characteristic of a spiritual and resolute people, which therefore needed no formal or bureaucratic state machinery. Consequently, he did not, after all, want the plurality of sacred forces, but rather the replacement of a sterile and petrified order by a new unity. The unifying and exclusive Gleichshaltung was one of the ways in which the National Socialist revolution failed, even though it did partly rely on non-individual forces that did not respect the borders between spirituality, politics, erotics, and so on. Georges Bataille (1989, 149) writes in his 1933 essay “La Structure Psychologique du Fascisme” that the crystallisation of religious and military command in one point—even in one individual—in Fascism and Nazism represents a denial of humanity, since the value of humanity is based on the play of internal contradictions.7 Heidegger advocates the unity and uniqueness of Hitler’s charismatic command (and, accordingly, scolds the party for relying too much on structure and institutions), because it represents the right kind of national leadership. Even though Heidegger understands the life of a people as filled with battle (kämpferisch) and Being itself as based on struggle, he still opts for channelling the “play of internal contradictions” towards one great destiny.8 For Heidegger, the sacred is not, in the final analysis, a value in itself, a finality, but must serve the state; a task which is in Bataillean terms impossible, since the sacred does not serve (but is sovereign). In fact, the measure given by the sacred or the divine that Heidegger hopes for always eludes the state or is reduced into a golden-calfish order. The problem of Heidegger’s centripetalism and the monotheism (or monosacrism) of the centre of the polis may be analysed through a metaphor from Foucault.9 One of the most central observations Foucault makes on power is that power is not a “liquid” substance that resides in the king/centre and flows downwards and outwards from him in the hierarchy. Rather, power is a potentially omnipresent phenomenon, originating in everyday practices that on first sight may seem apolitical or unconnected with power. The illusion that power is “held” by the king is produced when the everyday, grass-root power phenomena work in a concerted manner, as if directed towards the king and thus “giving” him the power. The sovereign is not at the centre because he sees everything, but because the faces 146

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of his subjects are turned towards him. The same goes for the Heideggerian centre of the polis. It is not the centre because it has the (physical, causal) capacity to bind and command everyone in the polis, but it becomes the centre when all the activities of the polis—its agriculture, its houses, its temples, its poetry—happen as if their “faces” were turned toward it, in its rhythms. This holds even more strictly if we accept Heidegger’s view that the unifying and responsibility-evoking power of the centre is non-human and non-individual. This non-individual, asubjective power functions in both ways: it can be recognised in the centre and can exert its influence from there only if it is “given” to the centre from the margins. A more fundamental critique of Heidegger’s centripetalism and mono-polism is possible if we heed his own advice and start from the phenomenon itself and direct our inquiry according to it. What is the centre of the polis about? To whom does it present itself as a centre? The centre of the polis is a Gestalt that opens up and gives measure to a world. It is the pre-individual condition of possibility for meaning that provides the fateful matrix for anything that humans can care about. It makes humans responsible when humans live as mortals, with a history. The centre of the polis is one way in which asubjective experience organises itself. Asubjective experience, as such, is holistic. One can not change one part of it without having an effect on the others. Let us take falling in love as an example. Having fallen in love, the love and the loved become new centres and measures of life. It may even seem that there really is only one centre for the person in love: the love/the loved. However, at the same time as falling in love transforms the whole world of the lover, other “sub-centres” have appeared in his/her experience, new objects and goals present themselves, and old ones, old sub-centres, fade away and disappear. Asubjective experience can not have only one centre, since in that case it would be immobile, dead, petrified. There are always several centres, and the relationship between the centre that seems most pertinent and its subcenters is never completely clear or settled. The holistic and subterranean connection between the centres is the mobile force in the “stages of love” that Plato describes in Symposium. No matter whether we agree with the direction of development that Plato indicates or not, the phenomenon itself shows how asubjective centres of experience change through a mutual tug-of-war. For Heidegger, resoluteness, the nation and the state are not phenomena on the level of subjects. Rather, he sees them as collective forces that erode individuality and thereby make possible the discovery of the essence of Dasein. Žižek sees the Heidegger of the 1930’s as the best, since Heidegger is then at his most subjectivistic, as indicated by the use of terms like “will” and “people”. Furthermore, Žižek points out that Nazi concepts like discipline and sacrifice have the right form but a wrong content. The distinction between form and content makes possible Žižek’s claim of a right step (form) to a wrong direction (content). However, it may very well be that Heidegger never took the step. He would not see the concepts mentioned by Žižek as subjectivistic, and he would strongly dispute the distinction between form and content. For Heidegger, the will, the people and the state are non-subjectivistic in a 147

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way that does not allow a neat separation into form (e.g., the state as an organising principle) and content (e.g., the division of labour in a state). It is precisely this inseparability of form and content that makes Heidegger’s revolution and the National Socialist revolution anti-modern and anti-Enlightenment. From the modern point of view, Heidegger’s concepts of people, state and will do not have a form at all, at least not a proper form. There is just the concrete content, the “twist”. Heidegger is not trying to create a super-subject called “the people” or “the nation”. Rather, he is dissolving all subjects into the asubjective national (völkisch) experience. A crucial observation in Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of subjectivity is that the subject can not escape from the subject. The subject can be dissolved, defanged, de-structured only through the active intervention of something asubjective—whether that asubjective is called Being, the people, the divine, to deinon, or something else. The purpose and mode of being for the subject is the continued permanence, predictability and security of itself. Therefore the subject is always biased towards predictable and controllable social structures like the state. The bias is clear in Žižek’s notion of the minimalistic subject that in his theory functions as a guarantee for a European (translatable, commensurable) field of meaning. Likewise, the bias is evident in Žižek’s theory of revolution, according to which revolutions are supposed to be unpredictable and indeterministic events without guarantees. If this really is so, then revolutions are genuinely unique, and consequently outside the reach of a systematic and structural critique of ideology. This, in turn, means that phenomena like Stalinism (or Nazi genocide) do not have an ultimate theoretical explanation. Revolutions and their horrible consequences are unique, and can not be reduced into theories constructed out of well-defined concepts. The idea that revolutions possess a non-historical dimension that is accessible through critical theory contains more than a shade of the metaphysics of subjectivity aiming for predictability and control. If the subject is in a Žižekian way toned down to its very minimum and revolutions are seen as genuinely unique, then nothing can guarantee that a revolution does not go bad and turn into horrible massmurder and genocide. From the point of view of psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology (and of Enlightenment critique, in general) the situation is even more dire: the misfiring of a revolution does not, even in principle, have a consistent and complete theoretical description. * Heidegger’s claim that the state is the highest form of Being for a people shows that his political thought is flawed. Because the claim is an integral part of his philosophy, it is at the same time a kind of reductio ad absurdum of more than just his politics. Already when philosophy gets the urge to call something—anything—the highest form of human existence, it has lost its way. To call the state the highest form shows not only a kind of misguided obsession with existential ranks but is also factually odd, given that humans have flourished for millennia without states—the time that states have existed is only a fraction of all of human history.

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Schematically, the claim has two roots. The first is the idea that the state is an order of rank as given by struggle (polemos). Connected are the leader-follower structure and the overcoming of individuality through national destiny. The second is the idea that the state is formed by its shining, sacred centre, when all things in the state turn towards the centre as organised by the way Being is revealed by the logos in the centre. This implies the semi-divine task set by the poet, thinker, artist, politician: the unique ones reveal a new understanding of Being and the few transmit it to the many. To borrow Žižek’s expression, what is the twist that produces a rotten fruit out of these roots? Both roots start well, but end up twisted even before they hit the stem. We may let Heidegger keep the view that polemos is the root of human being, if not else then in order to keep Žižek’s suspicions of harmony at bay. Maybe struggle indeed gives rank to human being, maybe it reveals leaders and followers. We may also accept that someone like Heraclitus, Hölderlin or Hitler opens up new avenues of existence that their followers may for better or worse realise in their lives. All of this is still at least potentially rebellious, going against established bourgeois order and the forgetting of Being, potentially creative of new impetuous meaning. It is decisive that the polemos is kept alive, so that the rank does not get petrified. And therein is the political mistake of the National Socialist movement. It creates a system the purpose of which is to uphold and solidify the newly found rank, not to destabilise it and keep it flowing. Secondly, it sets some of the parameters of the rank beforehand through racial thinking, pseudo-biological or not. Instead of leadership implying the destruction of hierarchies, including state hierarchies, Nazi leadership forms ever more petrified and large pyramids of power, at a time encompassing most of Europe. The understanding of Being opened by the National Socialist movement and Hitler at first reveals something historically new, successfully challenging the bourgeois world, maybe in a most generous interpretation also suggesting a new sphere of the sacred, where something divine may appear. But then the promise fades and turns into a feverish enlargement, reification and repetition of the incipient rank. The new rank and understanding of Being with all of its pre-established inequalities and murderous purities is supposed to last for a thousand years. At the same time the anti-liberal and anti-individual forces that it has fostered result in destruction that the state by no means tries to stop—on the contrary, it encourages the destruction when and where it sees fit. In addition to prejudice, thoughtlessness, malice and cruelty the National Socialist ideology and state contain too many structures that tend to uphold rank and the state and too few processes that tend to upset and renew the rank and the state. If we take one more definition from Foucault, “to govern […] is to structure the possible field of action of others” (2002, 341), then the National Socialist state as reality and Heidegger’s ideal state both intend to fix the structure so that the possibilities lie in perpetuating the already revealed rank, the destruction of the enemy, the unquestioned authority of the new order. The role Heidegger envisages for himself is to educate the new elite so that Hitler’s state persists.10 The Nazis—like anyone else—had 149

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also the possibility to restructure politics so that political processes systematically thwart attempts at permanent hierarchy and despotism. The classic Greeks knew some things about such processes (such as election of representatives by lottery) and so did the Germans of the early 20th century. Thus, such processes and structures are not outside the Greco-German-European heritage or essence. Heidegger thought otherwise, and his line of thinking is not far removed from the idea that there are, after all, some pre-established differences of rank between peoples—even though the rank is not given by God or by Nature, but by the struggle in Being.11 The rank revealed and given by polemos can not be connected to an idea of a thousand-year state if the rank is new at every moment and if it leads to the recognition of the “inner contradictions” mentioned by Bataille, rather than to an eradication, violent if necessary, of such contradictions and impurities. With regard to the centre of the polis, its is understandable that the political animal, zoon politikon, wishes for common meaning and a shared sense of the sacred. However, why there should be only one such centre and only one area of sacredness, is not clear. Heidegger’s account of Aphaia as the centre of Greek experience of the divine may be correct or not; in any case his claim that the greatness of the Greek world was possible only through monotheism and avoidance of unclarified polytheism, sounds dubious, to say the least. It may be that hidden monotheism was a condition for some aspects of Greek greatness, but is not one of those aspects precisely the kind of “greatness” that feeds directly into technological domination? It is by no means clear that monotheism and mono-polism would work against a technological understanding of Being. Another twist in this root is Heidegger’s preference for subordinating meaning and the sacred to unity and continuity, maybe even purity. Heidegger simply understands the phenomenon, asubjective experience, wrongly. Asubjective experience is essentially multi-centred. Elevating and emphasising one centre by depressing and impoverishing the others goes only so far. Asubjective experience is like a sandbox where the piling of one pyramid of sand always not only produces a corresponding hole but also in a way that defies the laws of physics produces several other piles, side-piles, that may end up being bigger and more central than the pile one is working on. The more determined and ferocious one is in trying to flatten these side-piles, the more recalcitrant, plural and obstinate they become. To put the matter more precisely and in more Heideggerian terms, a mono-polistic and one-centered unconcealment of Being is possible as a result of a particular kind of historical Dasein, in exactly the same way that a liberal-individualist-technological unconcealment of Being is also historically possible. The goal of the National Socialist revolution and of Heidegger’s ideal revolution was unfortunately this: to unconceal the world centred around one Führer, one national destiny. Heidegger correctly criticises the liberal understanding of the world and correctly engages in revolution against it. Even though the new unconcealment of Being propagated by his revolution in part fixes some of the mistakes of liberalism (for instance, by overcoming the illusions of “free-floating” individuality), it is unfortunately at places 150

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even more hierarchic, purified, more state-centred and mono-polistic. Therefore it does not do, therefore Heidegger’s thinking on the revolution is not enough. So what about the correction suggested by Žižek? Unfortunately it does not tackle the right problem. Žižek wants to reverse the step Heidegger took into asubjectivism by rehabilitating the minimal, empty subject. The subject as a structure then makes possible a universal, non-historical dimension, in which revolutionary acts can be separated from ordinary acts and true revolutions from false ones. The separation is made by identifying a Hegelian “concrete universal”, an ordinary act that at the same time contains, in the symbolic sphere, a universal dimension, which persists even if the act fails. All of this is interesting, even revealing, but also largely beside the point. What do we need the universal dimension for, especially when the baggage that comes with the dimension is unmistakeably idealistic, Platonistic, and not materialistic, not even in the way that Žižek uses the term? The universal form of the act in the symbolic sphere is completely structural, formal, unable to give the revolutionary act any direction, leftist or otherwise. In order to direct the act, we need a historical subject, the subject of labour. The non-historical subject is at best an unnecessary abstraction, at worst a ruse. Why would not the historical subject of labour without any structural guarantees for universally recognisable revolutionary acts be enough? Is it not enough to recognise an ordinary act as exemplary, to try to follow it and do something similar, without any illusions of universal non-historical identity between the acts?12 And even if that is not enough, isn’t it in fact all that we have? Žižek›s suggested correction does not address the real problem in Heidegger›s revolution, the petrification of the revolutionary rank into a mono-polistic state. Žižek does not worry about the problem of fostering and solidifying hierarchies and leadership. He might even think that such features are desirable: at least his view on state power and wielding of state power are somewhat unclear. He has, after all, said surprisingly little on the relationship between state and power, other than that state power should be grabbed if and when possible. Very well. But how do we stop the centralisation of state power, the petrification of hierarchies, the increasing technocratisation of administrative procedures? The concept of the minimalistic subject or the concept of the Hegelian concrete universal give no clues for answers to these questions. To be fair, Žižek does not pretend that he has the answers. He leaves open the questions concerning the forms and possibilities of future revolutions, like he leaves open the criticism or explanation of post-October Stalinism. This openness is to Žižek’s credit. But again: such openness is perfectly possible without the concept of the empty subject with all its idealistic baggage. We are left with a simple and raw question. What of the people who do not and who do not want to form a state? What is their meaningful and demonic contribution to the overcoming of the impasse of Europe? According to Žižek, such people live a premodern dream of a (really impossible) harmony between man and nature. According to Heidegger, they are without history and incapable of meaningful work. Maybe they are something between humans and animals, since they lack a historical 151

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destiny and a historical situation, in which they could choose their hero or leader. These kinds of “stateless groups” are, according to Heidegger, stuck in a rut without a possibility to realise their authentic Dasein which could be found only through historical work as a part of a nation. But how big parts of Heidegger’s and Žižek’s accounts are nothing but thoughtless prejudice, unwitting caricature, which their theories build out of material that is unknown, indeed, heterogeneous with regard to the theories themselves? Žižek’s basic suspicion that everything non-modern contains an illusory, “harmonious” and seamless holism of humans and nature, is obviously a baseless European projection. How about Heidegger’s view on stateless groups? Why could stateless groups not be historical in the sense that their understandings of Being change in reply to the works of poets, artists, thinkers and—lo and behold—even politicians? Why destiny—even collective destiny—could not be the refusal of states and the work organised inside states?13 After all the talk on revolution the glass is half full, half empty. Half empty, because few philosophers have said anything interesting or intelligible on the role of that which is not Europe. Half full for exactly the same reason. What could Heideggerian and Žižekian politics mean if we do not want a state ordered by rank or do not want to become Parisian? Heidegger’s gift is that he has opened paths towards local and non-European thinking. He says even that conventional European views may turn out to be insufficient when thinking about what exists today.14 Heidegger is committed to Europe, but he recognises that there are unconcealments of Being that are incommensurable with the European one and that have their own historical destinies. What is Žižek’s gift, then? In the famous television encounter between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, Chomsky presents the Enlightenment line according to which a revolution is done because one has to be just (Chomsky & Foucault, 2006). In reply, Foucault blurts that revolution is done because one wants it, and in the process one has no ultimate guarantees or grounds—thus expressing the voluntarist view. If Heidegger was at his best in the political tumult of the 1930’s, then Žižek has (at least so far) been at his best while disrobing the cape of deterministic inevitability from revolutions and urging that a revolution is needed as a voluntarist attempt to stop the rush of history towards catastrophe.15 An essentially European revolution would not stop even the European train from reaching its destination in destruction. Fortunately there are many kinds of revolutions, also ones in which the guiding principles of Europeanness—either those identified by Heidegger or those propagated by Žižek—are not dominant. Many revolutions outside Europe have been too tightly wedded to European models, which more than once explains their failure in reaching the goals that they set for themselves. Many, but not all. There is the already mentioned slave rebellion in Haiti, exemplifying the values of the French revolution better than the French revolution itself, for which the Haitians are still paying a price. There is the green so-called “Cocos revolution” in Bougainville, a revolution that rejects Western corporate power and relies on local hybrid skills. There is the Gandhian independence struggle of India that contains 152

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a whole political and spiritual philosophy born in the Auseinanderstezung of European and Indian-Asiatic worlds. There is the Zapatista revolution in Mexico, combining Marxism and indigenous thought with a creativity that has inspired global movements, and not (only or mainly) the wishy-washy “gentle openness” towards Mother Earth that Žižek expects. There are still many wonders undreamed of in philosophies. NOTES 1

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Moreover, did not the Greek cult of Dionysos utilise psychedelic mushrooms (mushrooms that according to the cult did not grow from seeds but from strokes of lightning), before it was tamed into a wine-Dionysos, after winemaking and other cultivation came from Asia? (Land 2011, 97) According to Land, despite its obvious merits, for instance, in deconstructing the division of labour between poetic and philosophical language, Heidegger’s interpretation on Trakl domesticates Trakl’s views on the traumatic origin of meaning into a pseudo-radical account of language with an “immaculate or uncontaminated conception” (2011, 119). The domestication is done, for instance, through selecting the Greek words through which Heidegger reads Trakl’s topos of the sky and the stars (Land 2011, 94-99). Including the fossil energy that does the work and underlies the division of labour, see Vadén (2010). Heidegger writes to Elisabeth Blochmann (Heidegger & Blochmann 1998, 37, 46) that the revolution of the 1930’s is important not only because it goes against Marxism but also because it opposes the Catholic Zentrum politics. He emphasises his words by saying that Communism may be bad but Jesuitism is downright diabolical (ibid., 37). Moreover, in 1936 Heidegger tells Löwith (1993, 60) that he underestimated the amount of resistance that the Church was able to muster to the revolution. Heidegger speaks of the Führer as a demi-god: “Der wahre und je einzige Führer weist in seinem Seyn allerdings in den Bereich der Halbgötter. Führersein ist ein Schicksal und daher endliches Seyn.” (GA39, 210). The context here is Hölderlin. Heidegger wants to separate the finite destiny of a Führer from the full divinity of Christ and so point out that Hölderlin does not suggest a return to Christianity. When Jaspers asked Heidegger, how an uncultivated man like Hitler could lead Germany, Heidegger answered: “Just look at his wonderful hands!” (Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, cited in Sheehan 1988; see also Faye 2009, 132-135). “[…] ich im Eros leben muß, um das Schöpferische, das ich noch als Ungelöstes und Letztes in mir Spüre, noch wenigstens in eine unvollkommene Vorform zu bringen.” (2005, 304; see also 2005 264). In the lectures “Die Grundfrage der Philosophie”, GA36/37. Bataille writes: “toute réalisation illimitée des formes imperatives a le sens d’une négation de l’humanité en tant que valeur dépendant du jeu de ses oppositions internes.” (1989, 149) Bataille was a very acute observer of Nazism and Fascism. Between 1934-37 he wrote a series of notes under the title “La Critique de Heidegger: Critique d’une philosophie du fascisme” (Bataille 2006). In the circle around Alexandre Kojève to which Bataille with Emmanuel Levinas, among others, belonged, Heidegger’s Nazism was known and discussed already in the 1930’s (Geroulanos 2006). Even Being itself is, for Heidegger, eschatological since the ultimate end times (εσχατον) must historically collect everything contained in the origin: “Das Sein selbst ist als geschickliches in sich eschatologisch.” (GA5, 327). If Heidegger’s philosophy can be described as a search for religion without God or as a search for a non-theological God, it can as well be described as a “subjectless Hegelianism” that sees in the history of Being an eschatological sequence without a subject, without an evolving Absolute spirit. This is why Heidegger’s revolution is an irresistible flame to Žižek-themoth, who wants to be “Hegel’s Luther”. Heidegger wants an asubjective Hegel, opened to Being, while Žižek wants a materialistic and voluntaristic Hegel. So close, so far. “The Subject and Power” in Foucault (2002). While lecturing on Hegel in 1934-35, Heidegger presents his own account (as an alternative, for instance, to Carl Schmitt’s version) of the philosophical and juridical ground that gives the Nazi state

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its permanence: “the state will be in 50 or 100 years”; “in 60 years our state will not be lead by the Führer; what comes then, depends on us” (cited in Faye 2009, 203-204, 212). Heidegger sees Hitler and Nazism as unbridled unconcealers of a new holiness that Heidegger, in turn, tries to domesticate into a foundation for a pure order of rank. The same Heideggerian strategy goes for Heraclitus and Hölderlin, too. Especially the cave-dweller of Ephesus who spoke of new suns and the ubiquity of change is hard to conceive as a friend of Reichs that last for centuries. Wasn’t Heraclitus, according to Diogenes Laertius, a refugee from the state? For the notion of ordinary acts and non-universal, situated ethics see Vadén & Hannula 2003, Hannula 2006. For descriptions of histories of “groups” without states, see Scott (2010). “Mir ist auf den Erfahrungen seit 1933 längst klar, daß unsere geläufigen europäischen Vorstellungen nicht zureichen, um das zu denken, was längst schon ist und—entschieden ist.” (Heidegger & Blochmann 1998, 96) “[…] left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, […] what alone can prevent such calamity is […] pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity”, (Žižek 2009a, 154).

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